Ice Station

"I'm trying! I'm trying!" Riley said.

"Try faster!"

Riley stretched his arm out under the platform, tried to reach the switch marked M on the grip that activated and deactivated the Maghook's powerful magnet.

As he did so, however, a strange thing happened.

For a brief second, Riley could have sworn that he heard Kirsty speaking to someone on the bridge above him.

"Help the diver, Wendy. Help the diver."

Riley blinked to himself. Must be hearing things.

Down in the pool, Schofield thought it was all over. The two killers on either side of him were closing in as they circled, shutting off any possible escape route.

Suddenly one of them seemed to break out of his circle and swing around. Schofield swallowed. He was coming round for the kill.

The killer turned in a slow, wide arc until he was pointing right at Schofield. His body was only a foot or so beneath the surface, and his high dorsal fin sliced easily through the waves in the pool. He was moving at such powerful speed that he created a rolling bow wave in front of his submerged black-and-white head.

The bow wave raced across the water, on a collision course with Shane Schofield.

Schofield looked around himself. There was nowhere to go this time, no weapon to use.

Out of sheer desperation he pulled out his Desert Eagle pistol, raised it above the water.

If it had to come to this, he thought, then it had to come to this.

The killer charged toward him.

And then suddenly a black missilelike object plunged into the water right in front of Schofield's face, right in between him and the killer whale.

Whatever it was, it was so sleek that it entered the water with barely even a splash, and once in, it zoomed away from him at phenomenal speed.

Both killers saw it instantly and immediately lost interest in Schofield. Even the one that had been charging at him only seconds before abruptly altered its path and raced off in pursuit of this new quarry.

Schofield was stunned. What had it been? It had looked almost like a... a seal of some sort.

And then, miraculously, a Maghook dropped into the water right in front of him.

Schofield grabbed it before it sank and immediately looked upward. Up on the bridge he saw Book Riley lying on his belly, with one arm stretched out underneath the bridge.

Schofield looked at the Maghook and suddenly felt a new lease on life come over him.

Just then, a small pointed black head popped up out of the water right in front of him and he fell backward in surprise.

It was Wendy. Kirsty's little Antarctic fur seal.

Her cute red collar glistened with wetness, and her soft black eyes looked right into his. If it was possible, Schofield could have sworn that the little seal was smiling?having a ball of a time swimming around in the pool, evading the less agile killer whales.

Then he realized. Wendy must have been the object that had dived into the pool in between him and the charging killer whale.

Suddenly Wendy's head snapped left.

She'd heard something, sensed something.

Then she gave what looked like a final happy nod to Schofield before she ducked back under the water and sped off down the length of the pool.

She swam fast. Speeding just underneath the surface of the water like a tiny black torpedo. Cutting left, ducking right, and then disappearing suddenly as she dropped into a steep vertical dive. No sooner had she moved than three black dorsal fins appeared behind her and immediately gave chase, before they themselves vanished beneath the surface in hot pursuit.

Schofield took the opportunity and swam for the nearest edge. He was three feet from the deck when a sudden surge of water rocked him and he rolled in the water as the giant body of one of the killers swept past him at a frightening speed. Schofield immediately tensed for another fight, but the whale just barreled past him, in search of the elusive Wendy.

Schofield breathed again, swam forward, and grabbed hold of the deck. He climbed up out of the water and saw the. battered ejection seat lying crumpled on its side on the deck in front of him. Then he turned around, surveyed the chaos around him.

Sarah and Abby were long out of the water and were now hurrying into the tunnels of E-deck. Not far from them were Rebound and Mother. Rebound was kneeling over Mother. He appeared to be applying pressure to a wound of some kind on Mother's leg.

On the other side of the pool Schofield saw the two surviving French commandos, also safely out of the water. Soaking wet, they were just getting to their feet on the deck. One of them saw Schofield and began to reach for his crossbow.

Just then, a sudden movement caught Schofield's eye and he turned and saw a familiar black shadow whipping down the length of the pool.

Wendy.

Three larger black-and-white shapes raced through the water behind her. The killers in pursuit.

Wendy was travelling at tremendous speed, just below the surface. Her flippers would occasionally sweep backward with a powerful stroke and then fall in by her sides so that her body remained as streamlined as possible. She looked like a bullet shooting through the pool, alternately appearing and disappearing in the murky red clouds that stained the icy water.

She was heading for the deck, for that part of the deck on which the two French commandos stood. And she wasn't slowing down.

In fact, it looked to Schofield like she was picking up speed as she sped toward the deck with the three black-and-white specters racing through the water behind her.

Schofield then watched in amazement as, within a meter of the deck, Wendy suddenly launched herself out of the water. It was a flat, graceful leap, and she landed smoothly on her belly on the deck and slid forward a full three meters.

She slid right past the two bewildered Frenchmen standing next to her.

But she didn't stop there. No sooner had she stopped sliding than she was up on her foreflippers and galloping as fast as she could, away from the water's edge.

For a fleeting instant Schofield wondered why she would do that. Surely once you were out of the water you were safe from the killers.

And then Schofield discovered why Wendy did what she did.

Like a demon rising from the depths, one of the pursuing killer whales roared out of the water and hurled its massive body up onto the deck, landing on the thick metal grating with an enormous crash. The huge whale slid fast across the deck, carried forward by the weight of its own inertia. It rolled smoothly onto its side as it moved, so that its jaws opened vertically, and then, with almost effortless grace, it caught one of the Frenchmen in its mouth and bit down hard.

The big animal's sliding movement stopped and it ground to a halt, with the French soldier?screaming madly, blood pouring from his mouth?held tightly within its jaws. The whale then began to shuffle its enormous frame awkwardly backward along the deck. After a few moments, it reached the edge and fell back into the water, taking the screaming Frenchman down with it.

Wendy had known. You weren't truly safe from the killers until you were well clear of the water's edge.

The six people remaining on the deck understood at once.

Get away from the edge.

Schofield saw Gant join Rebound on the other side of the pool. Saw them both hurriedly pick up Mother by the shoulders and start to drag her away from the edge. As they did so, Schofield caught a fleeting glimpse of Mother's lower body. The bottom half of one of her legs was missing.

At that moment there came a sudden resounding whump! from behind Schofield and he felt the deck beneath him shudder violently. He spun instantly, faced the pool, and saw the smiling face of one of the killer whales sliding across the deck toward him!

The whale slid across the deck fast.

Schofield was still on his knees.

The whale rolled onto its side, opened its mouth wide.

Schofield dived away from the massive creature, saw the battered ejection seat lying on the deck four feet behind him. If he could just get to it and leap over it, he'd be safe. He scrambled across the deck on his hands and knees, toward the big ejection seat.

The whale kept coming. Fast.

Schofield clawed at the deck, crawled as fast as he could. Not fast enough. He wasn't going to make it.

He wasn't going to be able to get over the ejection seat in time.

Schofield saw water spread out on the deck all around him. The wash from the advancing killer whale.

It was right behind him!

Schofield's adrenaline surged and he dived forward. He knew he wasn't going to make it over the chair, so he slammed himself, back first, into the ejection seat.

He was now facing the pool, "sitting" in the battered ejection seat as it lay crumpled on its side. He looked up and the killer whale filled his entire field of vision.

It was right on top of him! Less than a meter away. It came roaring toward him.

There was no chance of it slowing down.

No chance of it missing him.

And Shane Schofield shut his eyes as the killer whale's jaws came slamming down around his head.

There came a sudden otherworldly clang!, a noise louder than anything Schofield had ever heard in his life.

He had expected to feel pain?sharp, sudden, burning pain?as the killer whale's teeth chomped down hard on his head. But strangely, he didn't feel any pain.

Bewildered, he opened his eyes...

... and saw two long rows of razor-sharp teeth stretching away from him into darkness. In between the two long rows of teeth sat an obscenely fat, pink tongue.

It took a second for his brain to put it all together.

His head was inside the killer whale's month!

But for some reason?some unfathomable, incredible reason?he was still alive.

It was then that Schofield looked up and saw that his head was surrounded on three sides by the battered steel headrest of the ejection seat.

The killer whale's ferocious bite had come down hard on the headrest, on either side of Schofield's head. But the steel headrest had been strong enough to withstand the incredible force of the bite?it had halted the big whale's teeth only millimeters short of Schofield's ears. Now, two severe dents in the headrest jutted inward on either side of his head. One of them?sharp and jagged?had drawn a tiny bead of blood from his left ear.

Schofield couldn't see anything else. His entire upper body, from chest to head, was completely covered by the killer whale's mouth.

Suddenly the ejection seat jolted beneath him.

It scraped loudly against the metal deck, and Schofield fell back into the seat as the whole thing lurched forward.

The movement stopped suddenly, almost as soon as it had begun, and Schofield rocked forward and shuddered to a halt. He suddenly realized what was happening.

The whale was dragging him back toward the pool.

The ejection seat jolted once again, and he felt the seat slide another three feet across the deck.

In his mind's eye, Schofield could picture the whale's movements. It was probably shuffling backward?as the other one had done before with the Frenchman?undulating its massive body back across the deck as it dragged the four-hundred-pound ejection seat toward the edge of the deck.

The ejection seat moved again and Schofield felt a sudden rush of warm air wash over his face.

It had come from within the whale.

Schofield couldn't believe it. The killer whale was huffing and puffing, breathing hard as it held this unusually heavy prize within its jaws and dragged it back toward the water! Schofield wriggled in his seat as another rush of warm air hit his face and the seat jolted once again.

His feet were still sticking out from the base of the ejection seat, out from the side of the whale's propped-open mouth. If he could just wriggle down that way, he thought, he might be able to slip out of the chair?and out of the whale's mouth?before it reached the water.

Schofield moved slowly, gingerly, easing himself down in the ejection seat, not wanting to alert the whale to his plan.

Suddenly the seat lurched sideways. It screeched hideously as it slid across the metal deck. Schofield quickly grabbed hold of the armrests to stop himself from falling forward onto the big animal's teeth.

He lowered himself farther. Now his waist was out of the chair and his eyes were level with the whale's sharp, pointed teeth. The whale grunted as it heaved on the heavy steel chair.

Slowly, Schofield lowered himself an inch farther out of the chair.

And then he encountered a problem.

He was now sitting so low in the ejection seat that he couldn't keep a hold on the armrests anymore. He needed something to hold onto, something from which he could push himself out of the seat. He desperately looked around himself, searching for something to grab onto.

Nothing.

There was absolutely nothing to hold onto.

And then his gaze fell upon the killer whale's teeth in front of him.

I don't believe this, he thought as he reached up with both hands and took hold of two of the killer whale's enormous white teeth.

Suddenly the ejection seat jolted and slid again and Schofield felt it lift slightly off the deck. He had a sudden horrifying thought.

It's reached the edge of the deck.

And now it's tipping over it...

Holy shit.

Schofield gripped the whale's teeth tightly and pushed hard off them, and hurled himself clear of the ejection seat. He slid out from the chair, out from the side of the big whale's mouth, and fell clumsily onto the deck just in time to see the killer whale's rear end drop back into the pool. As its tail entered the water, the big whale's body tipped upward, and its head reared up, lifting the entire ejection seat off the deck. Then the killer whale's enormous black-and-white frame began to slide downward, into the water, and the great predator took its prize to a watery grave.

Schofield was on his feet in seconds, moving quickly across the deck toward Rebound, Gant, and Mother over by the south tunnel.

He spoke into his helmet mike as he ran. "Montana, this is Scarecrow, report."

"Still up on A-deck, Scarecrow. Snake and Santa Cruz're up here with me."

"How many up there?" Schofield asked.

"I count it as five military and two civilian," Montana's voice said. "But two of the military guys just made a break for one of the ladders and went down a level. What? Oh, fuck?"

The connection cut off. Schofield heard a scuffle.

"Montana?"

Suddenly a French commando stepped out onto the deck in front of Schofield himself.

He was the last of the five French soldiers who had fallen into the pool, the only one of them to come out of it alive. He looked like death warmed up?dripping wet, scowling, and mad as hell. He glared at Schofield, then raised his crossbow.

Without missing a beat, Schofield drew a throwing knife from a sheath strapped to his knee and threw it underhanded. The knife whistled through the air and thudded into the Frenchman's chest. He dropped instantly. The whole thing took two seconds. Schofield never stopped walking. He stepped over the slumped body, retrieved his knife and the dead French commando's crossbow, and kept moving.

He spoke into his helmet mike again: "Montana, I say again, are you all right?"

"I copy, Scarecrow. I'm OK. Revision on my previous count: make that four military and two civilians. Put me down for one more frog."

"Put me down for one, too," Schofield said.

Schofield arrived at the entrance to the south tunnel, where he found Gant and Rebound. They were dragging Mother into the tunnel.

Schofield saw Mother's leg immediately. A bloody, jagged piece of bone protruded from where her left knee should have been.

"Put her somewhere safe, stop the flow, and give her a hit of methadone," he said quickly.

"Got it?," Gant said, looking up at him. She cut herself off abruptly.

Schofield's antiflash glasses had been lost in the water in the battle with the killer whales, and Gant saw his eyes for the first time.

Two prominent vertical scars cut down across both of his eyes. They were unmissable, hideous. Each scar stretched downward in a perfectly straight line from eyebrow to cheekbone, scarring the eyelid in between.

Gant winced when she saw them and regretted it as soon as she did so. She hoped Schofield didn't notice.

"How are you feeling, Mother?" Schofield asked as they dragged Mother into the tunnel.

"Nothing one good kiss from a fine-lookin' man like you wouldn't fix," Mother growled through clenched teeth. Despite her pain, she, too, saw Schofield's scarred eyes.

"Maybe later," Schofield said as he saw a door set into the tunnel wall ahead of them. "In there," he said to Gant and Rebound.

They opened the door and dragged Mother inside, all four of them dripping wet. They were in a storeroom of some sort. Rebound immediately set to work on Mother's leg.

Schofield spoke into his helmet mike: "Marines, call in."

Names came in over the intercom as each Marine identified him- or herself.Montana, Snake, and Santa Cruz. All up on A-deck.

Rebound and Gant, E-deck. They called in formally over their helmet intercoms even though they were standing right next to Schofield, so that the others would hear their voices and know for a fact that they were still alive. Even Mother said her name, just for the record.

There was no word from Book, Hollywood, Legs, Samurai, or Ratman.

"OK, everyone, listen up," Schofield said. "By my count these bastards are down to four now, plus the two civilians they brought along with them to jerk my chain.

"This has gone far enough. It's time to end it. We have a numerical advantage, seven against four. Let's use it. I want a flush of this entire facility from the top down. I want these assholes pushed into a corner so we can finish them off without losing any more of our people. All right, this is how it's gonna happen. I want?"

There came a sudden thunking noise from above him and Schofield immediately looked upward.

There was a long silence.

Schofield saw a line of fluorescent lights bolted to the ceiling above him. They stretched away at regular intervals down the southern tunnel to his right.

And then, at that moment, as Schofield watched them, every single fluorescent light in the tunnel went out.

The world glowed incandescent green.

Night vision.

With his scarred eyes masked by his night-vision goggles, Shane Schofield climbed up one of the rung-ladders between E-deck and D-deck. He moved slowly and carefully, deliberately. He remembered Book saying once that wearing night-vision goggles is like wearing a pair of low-powered binoculars strapped to your head? you see something and you reach out to grab it, only to find that it's actually a lot closer than you think, and you knock it over.

The whole station was cloaked in darkness.

And silence.

Cold, eerie silence.

With the entire station filled with the flammable propellant from the air conditioners, all gunfire had ceased. The occasional shuffle of movement and the odd low whisper of someone speaking into a helmet microphone were all that could be heard in the pitch-darkness.

Schofield surveyed the green-lit station through his night-vision goggles.

The battle had entered a new phase.

Somehow, one of the French commandos must have managed to find the station's fuse box and turn off all the lights. It was a desperate ploy, but a good one nonetheless.

Darkness has long been the ally of numerically inferior forces. Even the advent of ambient-light technology?night-vision goggles and gun sights?hasn't diminished the average military tactician's opinion of the advantages of a small operation carried out under cover of darkness. It's a simple maxim of warfare?landed, naval, or airborne?nobody likes to fight in the dark.

"Marines, stay alert. Watch for flashers," Schofield whispered into his helmet mike. One of the great dangers of night-vision fighting is the use of stun grenades, or "flashers"? grenades that emit a sudden blinding flare of light that is designed to temporarily disorient an enemy. Since night-vision goggles magnify any given light source, if one sees a flasher go off through a pair of night-vision goggles blindness won't be temporary. It will be permanent.

Schofield peered up into the station's central shaft. No light entered the station from outside the enormous frosted-glass dome that topped the wide central shaft. It was June? early winter in the Antarctic. Outside, it would be twilight for the next three months.

Blackness. Total blackness.

Schofield felt Gant's weight on the ladder behind him. They were heading up the shaft.

As soon as the lights had gone out, Schofield had immediately ordered his team to "go to green." Then he had outlined his plan.

It was no use playing defense in a darkened environment They had to stay on the attack. Had to. The team that would win this battle would be the one that used the darkness to its advantage, and the best way to do that was to stay on the offensive. As such, Schofield's plan was simple.

Keep the French on the run.

They were down on numbers. Only four of the original twelve French commandos were still alive. And Montana had just said that two of those four had just evacuated A-deck. So they were also split into two groups of two.

But most important of all, they were running.

Schofield's team, on the other hand, was also split, but in a much more advantageous way.

Schofield had three Marines up on A-deck?Montana, Snake, and Santa Cruz?and another three down on E-deck: Gant, Rebound, and himself.

If the Marines up on A-deck could flush the remaining French commandos down through the station, soon those French soldiers would run right into the Marines from the lower decks. And then the Marines?a force of superior numbers, attacking from two flanks?would finish them.

But Schofield didn't want to get carried away, didn't want to get ahead of himself, because this would be no ordinary battle.

The fighting would be different.

For in the highly flammable gaseous atmosphere of the station, neither side could use guns.

This would be old-fashioned, close-quarter fighting.

Hand-to-hand combat.

In near total darkness.

In other words, it would be knives in the dark.

But as he'd thought about it more closely, Schofield had suddenly seen a problem with his plan.

The French had crossbows.

Schofield had looked at the crossbow he had taken from the dead French commando on E-deck. Since it didn't create a spark of any kind, a crossbow could be fired safely inside the gaseous atmosphere of the station. Schofield tried to think back to his early weapons training at the Basic School at Quantico, tried to remember the vital stats for a hand-held crossbow. He remembered that the standard range of accuracy for a small-size crossbow was not great, about the same as that for a conventional six-shooter, roughly twenty feet.

Twenty feet.

Damn it, Schofield thought. Knives would be useless if the French had a twenty-foot safety zone around themselves. With no corresponding projectile-firing weapon, the Marines wouldn't stand a chance. The thing was, they didn't have such a weapon. At least, nothing that they could use safely in the station's flammable gaseous environment.

And then it occurred to Schofield.

Maybe they did....

Schofield stepped up onto D-deck with his Maghook held out in front of him at shoulder height, ready to fire. In his other hand, he held the dead Frenchman's crossbow.

Although not exactly designed for accuracy, the Armalite MH-12 Maghook launcher has the ability to shoot its magnetic grappling hook quite substantial distances?over a hundred feet.

Initially, the MH-12 Maghook was intended for use in urban warfare and antiterrorist operations?its chief purpose was to provide a self-contained rope and grappling hook that could be used for scaling the sides of buildings, or providing zip lines along which antiterrorist units could slide and make rapid forced entries.

That being the case, the Maghook's small hand-held launcher had to have the power to shoot its hook to great heights. The answer was a state-of-the-art hydraulic launching system that provided 4,000 pounds per square inch of enhanced vertical thrust. The way Schofield figured it, if he fired his Maghook at an enemy soldier from a distance of twenty feet, 4,000 pounds per square inch of thrust had to have some chance of scoring a hit.

And indeed, as Schofield himself had discovered in the pool before, at close range, underwater, a Maghook had the capacity to stun a seven-ton killer whale. When fired at a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound man at similar range, above water, the Maghook would probably crack his skull.

Thus armed, the Marines were confident that they could handle the French commandos' crossbows.

So the plan would go ahead.

Montana, Snake, and Santa Cruz would work their way down through the station from A-deck, forcing the Frenchmen down, while Schofield, Gant, and Rebound worked their way up from E-deck. They would hopefully meet halfway and the rest would write itself.

Schofield and Gant had departed right away.

Rebound was to join them as soon as he had stemmed the flow of blood from Mother's leg and started her up on an intravenous line of methadone.

The three Marines on A-deck began their attack.

They moved quickly, using a textbook three-man flushing formation known as "leapfrogging." One Marine would move forward, ahead of his partners, and fire his Maghook. Then, while he reeled his hook in to reload, a second Marine would move in front of him?"leapfrogging" him?and fire his Maghook at the enemy. By the time the third man stepped forward and fired, the first man was ready to fire again and the cycle continued.

The two French soldiers on A-deck responded as they were supposed to?they retreated, hastened away from the rolling wave of powerful Maghook fire. They hurried for the ladders, climbed down the shaft.

However, as he fielded reports from Montana about the French soldiers' movement, Schofield noticed something odd about their evasive maneuvers.

They were moving too fast.

In their retreat down the shaft, the four French soldiers had completely avoided the destroyed B-deck catwalk and continued straight down to C.

They moved fluidly, in a swift two-by-two cover formation?the lead two men covering the forward flank, the rear two covering their pursuers behind, with a space of about ten yards between the two pairs.

Earlier, Montana had reported that all four of the French commandos were wearing night-vision goggles. They had come prepared.

They continued to move down the shaft fast.

Schofield had expected them to waste time in the tunnels as they tried to adopt a defensive position. But the French soldiers seemed to have other ideas. They darted into the C-deck tunnels only for so long as it took the Marines pursuing them from the levels above to join them. Then suddenly they appeared on the catwalk again and made for the rung-ladder leading down to D-deck.

At that moment, Schofield recalled something Trevor Barnaby had once said about strategy.

"Good strategy is like magic," Barnaby had said. "Make your enemy look at one hand while you're doing something with the other."

"They're moving for the southwest ladder," Montana's voice said in Schofield's earpiece. "Scarecrow, you down there?"

Schofield moved forward along the D-deck catwalk, the world green before his eyes. "We're on it."

He and Gant approached the southwest corner of D-deck, saw the rung-ladder that led up to C-deck.

Schofield spoke into his mike. "Rebound, where are you?"

"Finishing up now, sir," Rebound's voice replied from the storeroom down on E-deck.

"Flanking west, Sarge," the voice of José "Santa" Cruz said over the intercom.

Montana's voice: "Keep 'em coming, Cruz. Then send 'em down to the Scarecrow."

On D-deck, Schofield and Gant arrived at the rung-ladder. They crouched, leveled their weapons at the empty ladder. They heard boots stomping fast on the metal catwalk above them, heard the distinctive snap-phew! of a crossbow being fired.

"They're coming to the ladder," Santa Cruz's voice said.

More footsteps clanged on the metal grating.

Any second now ...

Any second...

And then suddenly, clunk, clunk.

What the hell?

"Marines! Eyes shut! Flasher on the ground!" Santa Cruz's voice yelled suddenly.

Schofield immediately squeezed his eyes shut just as he heard the stun grenade bounce on the metal deck above him.

The stun grenade went off?like a flashbulb on a camera? and for a brief instant the whole of Wilkes Ice Station flared white.

Schofield was about to open his eyes when suddenly there came a new noise from his right. It sounded like someone doing up a zipper really, really fast.

Schofield spun right and opened his eyes, and his green world streaked laterally. His eyes searched the empty shaft, but he saw nothing.

"Ah, shit!" Cruz said. "Sir! One of them just went over the railing!"

The zipping sound that Schofield had just heard suddenly made sense. It had been the sound of someone rappelling down the central shaft on a rope.

Schofield froze for a split second.

Such a move wasn't a defensive move at all.

It was a coordinated move, a planned move, an attacking move.

The French weren't actually on the run.

They were carrying out a plan of their own.

Make your enemy look at one hand while you're doing something with the other....

Like a chess player caught in check a second before he intends to play his own killing move, Schofield felt his mind start to spin.

What were they up to?

What was their plan?

In the end he didn't have time to think about it, because no sooner had he heard Santa Cruz's message than a volley of arrows thudded into the ice wall all around him. Schofield ducked and spun and saw Gant dive to the floor behind him, and then he spun back round and before he knew what was happening a figure slid down the rung-ladder in front of him and Schofield found himself standing face-to-face with the Frenchman he knew as Jacques Latissier.

Rebound was crouched over Mother in the storeroom on E-deck.

Mother had tough veins, and, to make it even more difficult, Rebound was wearing his night-vision goggles as he tried to get the needle into her arm. He'd missed the vein on his first four attempts, and he had only now just managed to get the IV line flowing into Mother's arm.

The IV done, Rebound stood up and was about to leave Mother when, strangely, he heard the sound of soft footsteps hurrying down the tunnel outside the darkened storeroom.

Rebound froze.

Listened.

The sound of the footsteps faded as they hurried off down the southern tunnel outside.

Rebound stepped forward and grabbed the doorknob and slowly, quietly, turned it. The door opened and he peered out into the tunnel through his night-vision goggles.

He looked left and saw the pool. Small waves lapped against the sides of the deck.

He looked right and saw a long, straight tunnel stretching away from him into darkness. He recognized it immediately as the elongated southern tunnel of E-deck that led to the station's drilling room.

Since it was the lowest level in the ice station, E-deck housed the station's drilling room?the room from which the scientists dolled down into the ice to obtain their ice cores. So as to maximize the depths to which the scientists could drill, the drilling room had been constructed as far into the ice shelf as possible?to the south of the station, where the ice was deepest. The room was connected to the main station complex by a long, narrow tunnel that stretched for at least forty meters.

Rebound heard the soft footsteps disappear down the long tunnel to his right.

After a short moment of pause, he raised his Maghook and ventured out into the tunnel after them.

Schofield fired his Maghook at Latissier.

The Frenchman ducked fast and the grappling hook thundered over the top of him and flew through the rung-ladder behind him. The hook looped itself over one of the rungs and knotted itself tight against the ladder.

Schofield threw his Maghook down and raised his crossbow at the same time as Latissier leveled his own at him.

The two men fired at the same time.

The arrows whistled through the air, crossing each other in midnight.

Latissier's arrow slammed into Schofield's armored shoulder plate. Schofield's arrow lodged in Latissier's hand as the big Frenchman covered his face with his forearm. He roared with pain as he frantically began to reload his crossbow with his good hand.

Schofield quickly looked down at his own crossbow.

The French crossbows had five circular rubber slots on their sides in which spare arrows were kept for quick reloading. Schofield's crossbow had five empty slots.

The commando he had taken it from must have used all but the last of his arrows earlier. Now there were none left.

Schofield didn't hesitate.

He took five quick steps forward and hurled himself at Latissier. He slammed into the Frenchman and the two soldiers went sprawling onto the catwalk behind the rung-ladder.

Gant was still lying facedown on the catwalk about five yards away when she saw Schofield tackle Latissier. She leaped to her feet and was about to go over and help him when suddenly another French commando slid down the rung-ladder in front of her and, through a pair of black night-vision goggles, stared right into her eyes.

Rebound slowly made his way down the long, narrow tunnel.

There was a door at the very end of the tunnel. The door to the drilling room. It was ajar.

Rebound listened carefully as he approached the half-open door. He heard soft, shuffling sounds from inside the drilling room. Whoever had run past the storeroom earlier was now inside the drilling room, doing something.

He heard the man speak softly into a microphone of some sort. He said, "Le piège est tendu."

Rebound froze.

It was one of the French commandos.

Rebound pressed himself flat against the wall next to the door and?still wearing his night-vision goggles?slowly peered around the door frame.

It was like looking through a video camera. First, Rebound saw the door frame, saw it slide out to the right of his green viewscreen. Then he saw the room open up beyond it.

And then he saw the man?also wearing night-vision goggles?standing right there in front of him, with a crossbow pointed directly at Rebound's face.

Even though the French commando standing in front of her was wearing night-vision goggles, Gant could tell that it was the one named Cuvier.

Jean-Pierre Cuvier. The one who had shot her in the head with his crossbow right at the start of all this. Even now, she could see the tip of that same arrow sticking out from the front of her helmet. The bastard seemed to smile when he realized that he was facing off against the American woman he had shot earlier.

In a blur of green, he brought his crossbow up and fired.

Gant was about twenty feet away and she actually saw the arrow dip in the air as it covered the distance between them. She sidestepped quickly, her gun hand flailing behind her, as the arrow thudded into her Maghook and sent it flying from her hand.

And then, before she knew it, Cuvier was right in front of her with his Bowie knife drawn. He came in fast, his long-bladed hunting knife arcing down toward Gant's throat?

There came a sudden metallic zing as Cuvier's blade came to a jarring halt.

Gant had caught his blow with her own knife.

The two soldiers separated and began to circle each other warily. Cuvier held his knife underhanded. Gant held hers backhanded, SEAL-style. Both still wore their night-vision goggles.

Suddenly Cuvier lunged and Gant swatted bis blade away. But the Frenchman had a longer reach, and as they separated again he swiped at Gant's goggles and dislodged them from her head.

For a single terrifying moment Gant saw nothing.

Just blackness.

Total blackness.

In this darkness, without her goggles, she was blind.

Gant felt the catwalk beneath her vibrate. Cuvier was lunging at her again.

Still blind, she ducked instinctively, not knowing whether it was the right move or not.

It was the right move.

She heard the swish of Cuvier's knife as it sliced through the darkness above her helmet.

And then she took the opportunity.

Gant thrust her hands forward in the darkness and grabbed Cuvier by the lapels.

"You remember giving this to me," she said, picturing the arrow sticking out from the front of her helmet. "Well, now you can have it back."

And with that Gant rammed her head forward.

With an explosion of blood, the arrow jutting out from the front of her helmet shot right through Cuvier's left eye and penetrated his brain. The Frenchman let out a hideous, inhuman scream, and Gant felt a wash of warm blood instantly spray all over her face.

She quickly withdrew the arrow from the French soldier's head and he dropped to the floor, dead.

While Gant fought with Cuvier, Schofield and Latissier rolled around on the catwalk.

As they fought, Schofield heard noises everywhere. Voices spoke frantically over his helmet intercom:

"?They're going round the other side!"

"?going for the other ladder!"

Footsteps clanged on the catwalk above him.

A crossbow fired somewhere nearby.

Schofield heard a sudden snap as Latissier managed to lock another arrow into the bolt of his crossbow. Schofield quickly elbowed the big Frenchman hard in the face, up under his night-vision goggles, broke his nose. Blood splattered everywhere, all over Schofield's arm, all over the lenses of Latissier's goggles.

The Frenchman grunted with pain as he flung Schofield away from him, toward the edge of the catwalk. The two men separated, and Latissier?still lying on the catwalk, half-blinded by the splotches of blood on his night-vision goggles? angrily brought his crossbow around toward Schofield's head.

Schofield was right at the edge of the catwalk, up against the railing. He thought fast.

He caught Latissier's weapon hand as it came round toward him and then, in a very sudden movement, rolled himself off the edge of the catwalk!

Latissier had never expected it.

Schofield kept his grip on Latissier's weapon hand as he fell, and, hanging from it, he swung down onto the empty deck below. Like a cat, Schofield landed on his feet and immediately raised Latissier's crossbow up at the underside of the D-deck catwalk and pulled the trigger.

Latissier was lying facedown on the catwalk?with his arm stretched awkwardly out over the edge?when the crossbow discharged. At point-blank range, the arrow shot up through a gap in the steel grating, penetrated Latissier's night-vision goggles, and lodged itself right in the middle of the Frenchman's forehead.

Down in the drilling room, Rebound faced the crossbow-wielding French commando.

The Frenchman thought he had the upper hand, thought he had Rebound dead to rights. He only forgot one thing.

Night vision is hell on peripheral vision.

He was standing too close.

Which was why he never saw the Maghook that Rebound was holding at his hip.

Rebound fired. The Maghook shot out from its launcher and slammed into the Frenchman's chest from a range of three feet. There came a series of instantaneous cracks as the French commando's rib cage collapsed in on his heart. He was dead before he hit the ground.

Rebound took a deep breath, sighed with relief, looked at the drilling room in front of him.

He saw what the Frenchman had been doing and his mouth fell open. And then he remembered what the Frenchman had said earlier.

"Le piège est tendu."

Then Rebound looked at the room again.

And he smiled.

"South tunnel," Montana's voice said over Schofield's helmet intercom.

Schofield was down on E-deck now, having swung down there on Latissier's arm. He looked across the pool and saw a black figure running into the south tunnel. It was the last French commando?save for the one who had rappelled down the shaft earlier.

"I see him," Schofield said, taking off in pursuit.

"Sir, this is Rebound," Rebound's voice suddenly cut across the airwaves. "Did you just say the south tunnel?"

"That's right."

"Let him come," Rebound said firmly. "And follow him down."

Schofield frowned. "What are you talking about, Rebound?"

"Just follow him, sir." Rebound was whispering now. "He wants you to."

Schofield paused for a moment.

Then he said, "Do you know something that I don't, Corporal?"

"That I do, sir," came the reply.

Montana, Snake, and Gant joined Schofield on E-deck, at title entrance to the south tunnel. They'd all heard Rebound over their helmet intercoms.

Schofield looked at them as he spoke into his helmet mike. "All right, Rebound, it's your call."

Schofield, Montana, Snake, and Gant edged cautiously down the long southern tunnel of E-deck. At the end of the tunnel they saw a door, saw the silhouette of the last French soldier disappear behind it, a shadow in the green darkness.

Rebound was right. The soldier was moving slowly. It was almost as if he wanted them to see him go into the drilling room.

Schofield and the others pressed forward down the tunnel. They were about ten yards away from the door to the drilling room when suddenly a hand reached out from the shadows and grabbed Schofield by the shoulder. Schofield spun instantly and saw Rebound emerge from a cupboard set into the wall. There seemed to be another body in the cupboard behind Rebound. Rebound pressed bis finger against his lips and led Schofield and the others down the tunnel toward the drilling room door.

"It's a trap," Rebound mouthed as they reached the door.

Rebound pushed open the door. It creaked loudly as it swung open in front of them.

The door swung wide and the Marines saw the last Frenchman standing over on the far side of the drilling room.

It was Jean Petard. He looked forlornly at them. He was caught in a dead end, and he knew it. He was trapped.

"I . . . I surrender," he said meekly.

Schofield just stared at Petard. Then he turned to Rebound and the others, as if calling for advice.

Then he stepped forward into the drilling room.

Petard seemed to smile, relieved.

At that moment, Rebound suddenly stuck his arm out in front of Schofield's chest, stopping him. Rebound had never taken his eyes off the Frenchman.

Petard frowned.

Rebound stared at him and said, "Le piège est tendu."

Petard cocked his head, surprised.

"The trap is set," Rebound said in English.

And then Petard suddenly averted his gaze and looked at something else, something on the floor in front of him, and his smile went flat. He looked up at Rebound, horrified.

Rebound knew what Petard had seen.

He had seen five French words, and as soon as he had seen them, Petard knew that his fight was over.

Those five words were: BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L'ENEMMI.

Rebound stepped forward and Petard yelled, "No!" but it was too late. Rebound stepped through the trip wire in front of the door, and the two concave mines in the drilling room exploded with all their terrifying force.

THIRD INCURSION

16 June 1130 hours

The highway stretched away into the desert.

A thin, unbroken strip of black overlaying the golden-brown floor of the New Mexico landscape. Not a single cloud appeared in the sky.

A lone car raced along the desert highway.

Pete Cameron drove, sweating in the heat. The air conditioner in his rented Toyota had long since given up the fight for life, and now the car was little more than an oven on wheels. It was probably ten degrees hotter inside the car than it was outside.

Cameron was a reporter for the Washington Post, had been for three years now. Before that, he had made a name for himself doing features for the respected investigative-reporting journal Mother Jones.

Cameron had fitted in well at Mother Jones. The journal has one all-encompassing goal: to expose misleading government reports. Cover-ups. And to a large extent, it had been successful in achieving this goal. Pete Cameron loved it, thrived on it. In his last year at Mother Jones, he had won an award for an article he had written on the loss of five nuclear warheads from a crashed B-2 stealth bomber. The bomber had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Brazil and the U.S. Government had issued a press release saying that all five warheads had been recovered, safely and intact. Cameron had investigated the story, had queried the methods used to find the missing nukes.

The truth soon emerged. The rescue mission had not been about the recovery of the warheads at all. It had been about recovering all evidence of the bomber. The nuclear warheads had been a secondary priority, and they had never been found.

It was that article and the award ftiat followed it that had brought Cameron to the attention of the Washington Post. They offered him a job, and he took it with both hands.

Cameron was thirty years old and tall, really tall?six-feet-five. He had messy sandy-brown hair and wireframe glasses. His car looked like a bomb had hit it?empty Coke cans were strewn about the floor, intermingled with crumpled cheeseburger wrappers; pads and pens and scraps of paper stuck out from every compartment. A pad of Post-its rested in the ashtray. Those that had been used were stuck to the dashboard.

Cameron drove through the desert.

His cellular rang. It was his wife, Alison.

Pete and Alison Cameron were something of celebrities among the Washington press community, the famous?or infamous?husband-and-wife team of the Washington Post. When Pete Cameron had arrived at the Post from Mother Jones three years ago, he had been assigned to work with a young reporter named Alison Greenberg. The chemistry between them had ignited immediately. It was electric. In one week, they were in bed together. In twelve months, they were married.

"Are you there yet?" Alison's voice said over the speaker phone. Alison was twenty-nine and had shoulder-length auburn hair, enormous sky blue eyes, and a beaming smile that made her face glow. Pete loved it. Alison wasn't conventionally beautiful, but she could stop traffic with that smile. At the moment, she was working out of the paper's D.C. office.

"I'm almost there," he replied.

He was on his way to an observatory out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Some technician at the SETI Institute there had called the paper earlier that day claiming to have detected some chatter over an old spy satellite network. Cameron had been sent to investigate.

It was nothing new. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, picked up stuff all the time. Their radio satellite array was very powerful and extraordinarily sensitive. It wasn't uncommon for a SETI technician, in his search for extraterrestrial transmissions, to "cross beams" with a stray spr satellite and pick up a few garbled words from a restricted military transmission.

Those pickups were disparagingly labeled "SETI sightings" by the reporters at the Washington Post. Usually they amounted to nothing?just incomprehensible one-word transmissions?but the theory was that maybe, one day, one of those garbled messages would provide the starting point for a story. The kind of story that ended in the word Pulitzer.

Alison said, "Well, call me as soon as you're done at the institute." She put on a mock-sexy voice. "I have a thing for SETI sightings."

Cameron smiled. "Very provocative. Do you do house calls?"

"You never know your luck in the big city."

"You know," Cameron said, "in some states, that could qualify as sexual harassment."

"Honey, being married to you is sexual harassment," Alison said.

Cameron laughed. "I'll call you when I'm done," he said before hanging up.

An hour later, Cameron's Toyota pulled into the dusty parking lot of the SETI Institute. There were three other cars parked in the lot.

A squat two-story office building stood adjacent to the parking lot, nestled in the shadow of a three-hundred-foot-tall radio telescope. Cameron counted twenty-seven other identical satellite dishes stretching away from him into the desert.

Inside, he was met by a geeky little man wearing a white lab coat and a plastic pocket protector. He said his name was Emmett Somerville and that it was he who had picked up the signal.

Somerville led Cameron down some stairs to a wide underground room. Cameron followed him silently as they negotiated their way through a maze of electronic radio equipment. Two massive Cray XMP supercomputers took up an entire wall of the enormous subterranean room.

Somerville spoke as he walked. "I picked it up at around two-thirty this morning. It was in English, so I knew it couldn't be alien."

"Good thinking," Cameron said, deadpan.

"But the accent was definitely American, and considering the content, I called the Pentagon right away." He turned to look at Cameron as he walked. "We have a direct number."

He said it with nerdy pride: The government thinks we're so important that they gave us a direct line. Cameron figured that the number Somerville had was probably the number for the Pentagon's PR desk, a number that SETI could have found by looking up the Department of Defense in the phone book. Cameron had it on his speed-dial.

"Anyway," Somerville said, "when they said that it wasn't one of their transmissions, I figured it was OK to give you guys at the paper a call."

"We appreciate it," Cameron said.

The two men arrived at a corner console. It consisted of two screens mounted above a keyboard. Next to the screens was a broadcast-quality reel-to-reel recording machine.

"Wanna hear it?" Somerville asked, his finger poised above the PLAY button on the reel-to-reel machine.

"Shoot."

Emmett Somerville hit the switch. The reels began to rotate.

At first Cameron heard nothing, then static. He looked expectantly at Emmett the Geek.

"It's coming," Somerville said.

There was a wash of some more static and then, suddenly, voices.

"?copy, one-three-four-six-two-five? "

"?contact lost due to ionospheric disturbance?"

"-?forward team?"

"?Scarecrow? "

"?minus sixty-six point five? "

"?solar flare disrupting radio?"

"?one-fifteen, twenty minutes, twelve seconds east?"

"?how," static, "get there so?"

"?secondary team en route?"

Pete Cameron slowly shut his eyes. It was another bum steer. Just more indecipherable military gobbledygook.

The transmission ended and he turned and saw that Somerville was watching him eagerly. Clearly, the SETI technician wanted something to come of his discovery. He was a nobody. Worse, a nobody out in the middle of nowhere. A guy who probably just wanted to see his name in the Washington Post in anything other than an obituary. Cameron felt sorry for him. He sighed.

"Could you play it again for me," he said, reluctantly pulling out his notepad.

Somerville practically leaped for the REWIND button.

The tape played again and Cameron dutifully took notes.

It was ironic, Schofield thought, that Petard, the last French commando, should be killed by one of his own weapons. Especially when it was a weapon that France had obtained from the United States by virtue of their alliance under NATO.

The M18A1 mine is better known throughout the world as the "Claymore." It is made up of a concave porcelain plate that contains hundreds of ball bearings embedded in a six-hundred-gram wad of C-4 plastic explosive. In effect, a Claymore is a directable fragmentation grenade?its lethality is dependent not on the force of its relatively small initial blast, but rather on the devastating fan-shaped spray of shrapnel that it emits. If one sits behind a Claymore, one will not be harmed by its shrapnel blast. If one is caught in front of it, one will be shredded to pieces.

The most well-known characteristic of the Claymore, however, is the simple instruction label that one finds embossed on the forward face of the mine. It reads: THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.

Or, in French, BRAQUEZ CE CÔTÉ SUR L'ENEMMI.

If you ever found yourself looking at those words, you knew you were looking at the wrong end of a Claymore.

The two Claymores in the drilling room had been central to the French commandos' last-ditch plan to beat the Marines. After it was all over, Schofield pieced together that plan:

They had sent someone down to the drilling room, ahead of the others. Once there, that person had set up the two Claymores so that they faced the door. The Claymores would then be connected to a trip wire.

Then, the other French commandos would pretend to retreat to the drilling room, deliberately allowing the Marines to follow them.

Of course, the Marines would know that the drilling room was a dead end, so they would think that the French, in their desperate attempt to flee, had run themselves into a corner, into a trap.

Surrender would be inevitable.

But as the Marines entered the drilling room to secure the French troops, they would break the trip wire and set off the two Claymores. The Marines would be cut to ribbons.

It was an audacious plan. A plan that would have changed the course of the battle.

And it was cunning, too. It turned a full-scale retreat? hell, a total surrender?into a decisive counterattack.

But what Petard and the French had not accounted for was that one of the American soldiers might come upon their trap while they were setting it.

Schofield was proud of Rebound. Proud of how the young Marine had handled the situation.

Rather than blow the lid on the French plan and continue with unpredictable hand-to-hand fighting, Rebound had coolly allowed the French to believe that their plan was still afoot.

But he had changed one thing.

He had turned the Claymores around.

That was what Petard had seen when Rebound had spoken to him in the drilling room. He had seen those chilling words.

THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY.

Pointing at him.

Rebound had got the better of him. And when Rebound stepped forward across the trip wire, it was to be the last thing that Petard ever saw. The battle, at last, was over.

An hour later, the station's lights were back on and all of the bodies, French and American, had been found and accounted for. At least, those bodies that could be found.

The French had lost four men to the killer whales; the Americans, one. Eight other French commandos and two more U.S. Marines?Hollywood and Ratman?had been found in various locations around the ice station. They had all been confirmed dead.

The Americans also had two wounded, both quite seriously. Mother, who had lost one of her legs to the killer whale, and, rather surprisingly, Augustine "Samurai" Lau, the very first Marine to have been gunned down by the French.

Mother was faring better than Samurai. Since her wound was a localized one?confined to the lower extremity of her left leg?she was still conscious. In fact, she still had full movement in all of her other limbs. The flow of blood from the wound had been stopped, and the methadone took care of what pain there was. The only enemy that remained was shock. Thus it was decided that Mother would remain in her storeroom on E-deck, under constant supervision. To move her might trigger a fit.

Samurai, on the other hand, was in a much worse state. He was in a self-induced coma, his stomach having been ripped to shreds by Latissier's barrage of gunfire at the very beginning of the battle.

The young Marine's body had responded to the sudden trauma in the only way it knew how?it had switched itself off. At the time they found him alive, Schofield had marveled at the ability of the human body to take care of itself in the face of such extreme crisis. No amount of methadone or morphine could have quelled the pain of that many gunshot wounds. So Samurai's body had done the next-best thing: it had simply turned off its sensory apparatus and was now awaiting external help.

The problem was whether or not Schofield could provide that external help.

Anything greater than basic medical knowledge is rare in a frontline unit. The closest thing such units have to a doctor is the team medic, who is usually a low-level Corporal. Legs Lane had been Schofield's medic, and he was now deader than dead.

Schofield walked quickly around the A-deck catwalk. He'd just come up from E-deck, where he had checked on Mother, and was now wearing a new pair of silver antiflash glasses. Mother had given them to him. She'd said that in her state, she wouldn't be needing them anymore.

Schofield poked his head around the dining room door. "What do you think, Rebound?" he said.

Inside the dining room, Rebound was working feverishly over Samurai's inanimate body. The body lay flat on its back on a table in the center of the room. Blood dripped off the edges of the table, forming a red puddle on the cold porcelain floor.

Rebound looked up from what he was doing. He shook his head in exasperation.

"I can't keep up with the blood loss," he said to Schofield. "There's just too much internal damage. His whole gut's been blown apart."

Rebound wiped his forehead. A slick of blood appeared above his eyes. He looked hard at Schofield. 'This is way out of my league, sir. He needs someone who knows what he's doing. He needs a doctor."

Schofield stared at Samurai's prone body for a few seconds.

"Just do what you can," he said, and then he left the room.

"OK, people, listen up," Schofield said. "We don't have much time, so I'm going to keep this short."

The six remaining able-bodied Marines were gathered around the pool on E-deck. They all stood in a wide circle. Schofield stood in the middle.

Schofield's voice echoed up through the shaft of the empty station: "This station is obviously a lot hotter than we originally thought. I'm thinking that if the French were willing to take a chance to grab it, others will, too. And whoever those others might be, by now they've had some time to get their shit together and prepare for a full-scale attack. Have no doubt, people, if anyone else decides to hit this station they will almost certainly be better prepared and more heavily armed than those French pricks we just exterminated. Opinions?"

"Concur," Buck Riley said.

"Same," Snake said. Book Riley and Snake Kaplan were the two most senior enlisted men in the unit. It meant something that they both agreed with Schofield's assessment of the situation.

Schofield said, "All right, then. What I want to happen now is this. Montana..."

"Yes, sir."

"I want you to go topside and position our two hovercrafts so that their range finders are pointed outward, so that they cover the entire landward approach to this station. I want maximum coverage, no gaps. Trip wires aren't going to cut it anymore with this place; we use the range finders from here. As soon as anyone comes within fifty miles of this station, I want to know about it."

"Got it," Montana said.

"And while you're up there," Schofield said, "see if you can get on the radio and raise McMurdo. Find out when our reinforcements are coming. They should've been here by now."

"You got it," Montana said. He hurried away.

"Santa Cruz ...," Schofield said, turning.

"Yes, sir."

"Eraser check. I want this whole facility swept from top to bottom for any kind of eraser or delay switch, OK? There's no knowing what kinds of little surprises our French friends left behind for us. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," Santa Cruz said. He broke out of the circle and headed for the nearest rung-ladder.

"Snake..."

"Sir."

"The winch that lowers the diving bell. Its control panel is up on C-deck, in the alcove. That control panel was damaged by a grenade blast during the fight. I need those winch controls working again. Can you handle it?"

"Yes, sir," Snake said. He, too, left the circle.

When Snake had gone, Riley and Gant were the only ones left on the deck.

Schofield turned to face them. "Book. Fox. I want vou two to do a full prep of our dive gear. Three divers, four-hour dive compression, low-audibility gear, plus some auxiliaries for later."

"Air mix?" Riley asked.

"Saturated helium-oxygen. Ninety-eight to two," Schofield said.

Riley and Gant were momentarily silent. A compressed air mix of 98% helium and 2% oxygen was very rare. The almost negligible amount of oxygen indicated a dive to a very high-pressure environment.

Schofield handed Gant a handful of blue capsules. They were N-67D antinitrogen blood-pressure capsules, developed by the Navy for use during deep-dive missions. They were affectionately known to military divers as "the pills."

By retarding the dissolution of nitrogen in the bloodstream during a deep dive, the pills prevented decompression sickness?better known as the bends?among divers. Since the pills neutralized nitrogen activity in the bloodstream, Navy and Marine Corps divers could descend as quickly as they liked without fear of nitrogen narcosis and ascend without the need for making time-consuming decompression stops. The pills had revolutionized military deep-diving.

"Planning a deep dive, sir?" Gant said, looking up from the blue pills in her hand.

Schofield looked at her seriously. "I want to find out what's down in that cave."

Schofield walked quickly around the curved outer tunnel of B-deck, deep in thought.

Things were moving fast now.

The French attack on Wilkes had taught him a lot. Wilkes Ice Station?or, more precisely, whatever lay buried in the ice beneath Wilkes Ice Station?was now officially worth killing for.

But it was the implications of that lesson that gave Schofield a chill. If France had been willing to launch an impromptu snatch-and-grab for whatever was down in that cave, it was highly probable that other countries would be willing to do the same.

There was one additional factor, though, about possible further attacks on Wilkes that caused Schofield particular concern: if someone was going to launch an attack on Wilkes. they would have to do it soon?before a full-strength U.S. force arrived at the station.

The next few hours would be very tense.

It would be a race to see who would arrive first.

American reinforcements or a fully-equipped enemy force.

Schofield tried not to think about it. There were a lot of things to do, and one matter in particular required his attention first.

After the battle with the French had concluded, the remaining scientists from Wilkes?there were five of them, three men and two women?had retired to their living quarters on B-deck. Schofield was heading for those living quarters now. He was hoping to find among those scientists a doctor who might be able to help Samurai.

Schofield continued to walk around the curved outer tunnel. His clothes were still wet, but he didn't care. Like all of the other Marines in his unit, he was wearing a thermal wet suit under his fatigues. It was practically standard attire for Recon Units working in arctic conditions. Wet suits were warmer than long Johns and didn't get heavy if they got wet. And by wearing one's wet suit instead of carrying it, a Recon Marine lightened his load, something very important for a rapid-response unit.

Just then, a door to Schofield's right opened and a cloud of steam wafted out into the corridor. A sleek black object slid out of the haze and into the corridor in front of Schofield.

Wendy.

She was dripping with water. She looked up at Schofield with a goofy seal grin.

Kirsty emerged from the steamy haze. The shower room. She saw Schofield instantly and she smiled.

"Hi," she said. She was wearing a new set of dry clothes, and her hair was tousled, wet. Schofield guessed that Kirsty had just had the hottest shower of her life.

"Hey there," Schofield said.

"Wendy loves the shower room," Kirsty said, nodding at Wendy. "She likes to slide through the steam."

Schofield suppressed a laugh and looked down at the little black fur seal at his feet. She was cute, very cute. She had also saved his life. Her soft brown eyes glistened with intelligence.

He looked at Kirsty. "How are you feeling?"

"Warm now," she said.

Schofield nodded. From the look of her, Kirsty seemed to have bounced back well from her ordeal in the pool. Kids were good like that, resilient. He wondered what sort of therapy an adult would need after falling into a pool filled with ferocious killer whales.

Schofield gave a lot of the credit to Buck Riley. Riley had been up on C-deck when Kirsty had been whizzed up there on the Maghook, and for the remainder of the battle Riley had kept Kirsty by his side, safe and sound.

"Good," Schofield said. "You're one tough kid, you know that? You ought to be a Marine."

Kirsty beamed. Schofield nodded down the tunnel. "You going my way?"

"Yeah," she said, falling into step beside him. Wendy loped down the corridor behind them.

"Where are you going?" Kirsty asked.

"I'm looking for your mom."

"Oh," Kirsty said, a little softly.

It was a strange response, and through his reflective silver glasses Schofield cast a sideways glance at Kirsty. She just stared at the floor as she walked. He wondered what it meant.

There was an awkward silence and Schofield searched for something to say. "So, uh, how old did you say you were? Twelve, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"What is that, seventh grade?"

"Mm"

"Seventh grade," Schofield mused. He was at a total loss for something to say now, so he just said, "I guess you must be starting to think about a career, then."

Kirsty seemed to perk up at the question. She looked across at him as they walked.

"Yeah," she said seriously, as though career thoughts had been weighing heavily on her twelve-year-old mind lately.

"So what do you want to do when you leave school?"

"I want to be a teacher," Kirsty said. "Like my dad."

"What does your dad teach?"

"He taught geology at a big college in Boston," Kirsty said. "Harvard," she added importantly.

"And what do you want to teach?" Schofield asked.

"Math."

"Math?"

"I'm good at math," Kirsty said, shrugging selfconsciously, embarrassed and proud at the same time.

"My dad used to help me with my homework," she went on. "He said I was much better at math than most other kids my age, so sometimes he would teach me stuff that the other kids didn't know. Interesting stuff, stuff that I wasn't supposed to learn until I was a senior. And sometimes he'd teach me stuff that they don't teach you at all in school."

"Yeah?" Schofield said, genuinely interested. "What sort of stuff?"

"Oh, you know. Polynomials. Number sequences. Some calculus."

"Calculus. Number sequences," Schofield repeated, amazed.

"You know, like triangular numbers and Fibonacci numbers. That sort of stuff."

Schofield shook his head in astonishment. This was impressive. Very impressive. Kirsty Hensleigh, twelve years old and a little short for her age, was apparently a very smart young lady. Schofield looked at her again. She seemed to walk on her toes, with a kind of spring in each step. She just looked like a regular kid.

Kirsty said, "We used to do a lot of stuff together. Softball, hiking, once he even took me scuba diving, even though I hadn't done the course."

"You make it sound like your dad doesn't do that sort of thing anymore?"

There was a short silence. Then Kirsty said softly, "He doesn't."

"What happened?" Schofield asked gently. He was waiting to hear a tale about fighting parents and a divorce. It seemed to happen a lot these days.

"My dad was killed in a car wreck last year," Kirsty said flatly.

Schofield stopped in midstride. He turned to look at Kirsty. The little girl was staring down at her shoelaces.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Kirsty cocked her head to one side. "It's OK," she said, and then resumed walking.

They came to a door sunken into the outer tunnel, and Schofield stopped in front of it. "Well, this is my stop."

"Mine, too," Kirsty said.

Schofield opened the door and let Kirsty and Wendy enter in front of him. He followed them inside.

It was a common room of some sort. Some ugly orange couches, a stereo, a television, a VCR. Schofield guessed that they didn't get regular TV transmissions down here so they just watched videos on the television.

Sarah Hensleigh and Abby Sinclair sat on one of the orange couches. They were also now wearing dry clothes. The three other scientists from Wilkes?three men named Llewellyn, Harris, and Robinson?were there, too. After seeing what the fragmentation grenades had done to Hollywood and one of their colleagues they had spent the remainder of the battle holed up in their rooms. Now they looked tired and weary, afraid.

Kirsty went over and.sat down on the couch next to Sarah Hensleigh. She sat down silently and didn't say anything to her mother. Schofield remembered the first time he had seen Sarah and Kirsty together?back before the French had arrived at Wilkes. Kirsty hadn't said much then either. Schofield hadn't noticed any tension between them then, but he noticed it now. He put it out of his mind as he walked over to Sarah.

"Is anyone here a medical doctor?" Schofield asked her.

Sarah shook her head. "No. No, Ken Wishart was the only doctor at the station. But he?" She cut herself off.

"But he what?"

Sarah sighed. "But he was on board the hovercraft that was supposed to be heading back to d'Urville."

Schofield shut his eyes, once again imagined the fate of the five scientists who had been on board the doomed hovercraft.

A voice crackled over his helmet intercom. "Scarecrow, this is Montana."

"What is it?" Schofield said.

"I've set up the range finders around the outer perimeter just like you wanted. You wanna come up and check it out?"

"Yes, I do," Schofield said. "I'll be up in a minute. Where are you?"

"Southwest corner."

"Wait for me," Schofield said. "Have you had any luck getting through to McMurdo?"

"Not yet. There's a shitstorm of interference on every frequency. I can't get through."

"Keep trying," Schofield said. "Scarecrow, out."

Schofield turned and was about to leave the common room when someone tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He turned. It was Sarah Hensleigh. She was smiling.

"I just remembered," she said. "There is a medical doctor at this station after all."

After the battle was over, the Marines had found the two French scientists, Luc Champion and Henri Rae, cowering in a cupboard in the dining room on A-deck.

They had not offered any resistance. Indeed, as they had been dragged unceremoniously out of the cupboard to face their conquerors the horror on their faces had said it all. They had backed the wrong side in this fight. The men they had deceived were now their captors. The price for their treachery would be high.

Both men had been taken down to E-deck, where they were handcuffed to a pole in plain view. Schofield's team had work to do, and Schofield didn't want to waste any of his manpower guarding the two French scientists. By cuffing the two Frenchmen to a pole out in the open the Marines down on E-deck could work as well as keep an eye on them.

Schofield stepped out onto the B-deck catwalk. He was about to speak into his helmet mike when Sarah Hensleigh came out onto the catwalk behind him.

"I have something I have to ask you," she said. "Something I couldn't ask you back in the common room."

Schofield held up a hand, spoke into his helmet mike: "Rebound. This is Scarecrow. How's Samurai?"

Rebound's voice came in over his earpiece. "I've managed to stop the bleeding for the moment, sir, but he's still pretty bad."

"Stable?"

"As stable as I'm gonna get him."

"All right, listen. I want you to go down to E-deck and grab that French scientist named Champion, Luc Champion," Schofield said. He looked at Sarah as he spoke. "I've just been informed that our good friend Monsieur Champion is a surgeon."

"Yes, sir," Rebound said eagerly. He seemed relieved that someone more qualified might be able to take over Samurai's care. But then he seemed to check himself. "Uh, sir..."

"What is it?"

"Can we trust him?"

"No," Schofield said firmly as he began to climb up the rung-ladder toward A-deck. He motioned for Sarah to follow him up. "Not a whit. Rebound, you just tell him that if Samurai dies, so does he."

"Gotcha."

Schofield reached the top of the rung-ladder and stepped up onto the A-deck catwalk. He helped Sarah up behind him. Almost immediately, he saw Rebound emerge from the dining room doorway not far away and jog for the opposite rung-ladder. He was going down to E-deck to get Champion.

Schofield and Sarah headed for the main entrance to the station. As they walked along the catwalk, Schofield looked down at the station beneath him and thought about his people.

They were scattered everywhere.

Montana was outside. Riley and Gant were down on E-deck, getting the scuba gear ready for the dive to the cave. Snake was smack in the middle, in the alcove on C-deck, fixing the winch controls. And Santa Cruz was nowhere to be seen, since he was off conducting a search of the station for erasers.

Christ, Schofield thought, they were spread all over the place.

Schofield's helmet intercom crackled. It was Santa Cruz.

"What is it, Private?" Schofield said.

"Sir, I've conducted a search of the station and I've found no sign of any erasing device."

"No erasers?" Schofield frowned. "Nothing at all?"

"Not a thing, sir. My guess is they didn't expect things to happen so fast, so they didn't get a chance to lay any."

Schofield thought about that.

Cruz was probably right. The French team's plan had undoubtedly been cut short by Buck Riley's arrival at the station and his accidental discovery of what had really happened to the crashed French hovercraft. The French commandos' plan had been to win the Americans' trust and then shoot them in the back. Since that plan hadn't come to fruition, it was no surprise that they hadn't been able to set any erasers.

"But I did find something, sir," Santa Cruz said.

"What?"

"I found a radio, sir."

"A radio?" Schofield said dryly. It was hardly a mind-blowing discovery.

"Sir, this ain 't no ordinary radio. It looks like a portable VLF transmitter."

That got Schofield's attention. A VLF, or very low frequency, transmitter is a rare device. It has a frequency range of between 3 kHz and 30 kHz, which, in real terms; amounts to an unbelievably long wavelength. It is so long?or, in radio terms, so "heavy"?that the radio signal travels as a ground signal that follows the curvature of the Earth's surface.

Until only very recently, signals traveling at such low frequencies required very high-powered transmitters, which were, of course, very large and cumbersome. Thus they weren't often used by ground forces. Recent developments in technology, however, had resulted in heavy but nonetheless portable, VLF transmitters. They looked and weighed about the same as the average backpack.

The fact that the French had brought such a transmitter to Wilkes bothered Schofield. There was really only one use for VLF radio signals, and that was?

No, that's ridiculous, Schofield thought. They couldn't have done that.

"Cruz, where did you find it?"

"Down in the drilling room," Santa Cruz's voice said.

"Are you there now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Bring it out to the pool deck," Schofield said. "I'll come down after I check on Montana outside."

"Yes, sir."

Schofield clicked off his intercom. He and Sarah came to the entrance passageway.

"What are erasers?" Sarah asked.

"What? Oh," Schofield said. He only just remembered that Sarah wasn't a soldier. He took a deep breath. "Eraser is the term used to describe an explosive device that is planted in a battlefield by a covert incursionary force for use in the event that their mission fails. Most of the time, an eraser is set off by a delay switch, which is just an ordinary timer."

"OK, wait a minute. Slow down," Sarah said.

Schofield sighed, slowed down. "Small crack units like these French guys we met tonight usually find themselves fighting in places where they're not supposed to be, right? Like there would probably be an international incident if it could be proved that French troops were in a U.S. research station trying to kill everybody, right?"

"Yeah...."

"Well, there's no guarantee that these crack units are gonna succeed in getting what they came for, is there," Schofield said. "I mean, hey, they might come up against a team of tough hombres like us and wind up dead."

Schofield grabbed a parka off a hook on the wall and began to put it on.

He said, "Anyway, these days, nearly all elite teams?the French Parachute Regiment, the SAS, the Navy SEALs? nearly all of them carry contingency plans just in case they fail in their missions. We call those contingency plans 'erasers' because that's exactly what they're designed to do: erase that whole team's existence. Make it look like that team was never there. Sometimes they're called cyanide pills, because if any of the enemy are caught, the eraser will ultimately act as their suicide pill."

"So, you're talking about explosives," Sarah said.

"I'm talking about special explosives," Schofield said. "Most of the time erasers are either chlorine-based explosives or high-temperature liquid detonators. They're designed to wipe off faces, vaporize bodies, destroy uniforms and dog tags. They're designed to make it look like you were never there.

"Erasers are actually a relatively recent phenomenon. No one had ever really heard about them until a couple of years ago when a German sabotage team was caught in an underground missile silo in Montana. They were cornered, so they pulled the pin on three liquid-chlorine grenades. After those things went off, there was nothing left. No soldiers. No silo. We think the Germans were there to disable some ballistic nuclear missiles that we said didn't exist."

"A German sabotage unit. In Montana," Sarah said in disbelief. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Germany supposed to be our ally?"

"Isn't France supposed to be our ally?" Schofield replied, raising his eyebrows. "It happens. More often than you think. Attacks from so-called 'friendly' countries. They even have a term for it at the Pentagon; they call them Cassius Ops, after Cassius, the traitor in Julius Caesar."

"They have a term for it?"

Schofield shrugged into his coat. "Look at it this way. America used to be one of two superpowers. When there were two superpowers, there was a balance, a check. What one did the other countered. But now the Soviets are history and America is the only real superpower left in the world. We have more weapons than any other nation in the world. We have more money to spend on weapons than any other nation in the world. Other countries would go broke trying to keep up with our defense spending. The Soviets did. There are a lot of countries out there?some of whom we call friends? who think that America is too big, too powerful, countries who would really like to see America take a fall. And some of those countries?France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Great Britain?aren't afraid to give us a little push either."

"I never knew," Sarah said.

"Not many people do," Schofield said. "But it's one of the main reasons my unit was sent to this station. To defend it against any of our 'allies' who might decide to make a play for it."

Schofield pulled his parka tight around himself and grabbed the handle to the main door leading outside.

"You said you wanted to ask me about something," he said. "Can you talk as you walk?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess so," Sarah said as she quickly grabbed a parka off one of the hooks.

"Then let's go," Schofield said.

Down on E-deck, Libby Gant was checking the calibration on a depth gauge.

She and Riley were on the outer perimeter of the deck that surrounded the pool. It had been a good forty-five minutes since they had seen a killer whale, but they weren't taking any chances. They stayed well away from the water's edge.

Gant and Riley were checking the unit's scuba gear, in preparation for the dive that would be made in the station's diving bell.

They were alone on E-deck, and they worked in silence. Every now and then, Riley would wander over to the storeroom in the south tunnel and check on Mother.

Gant put down the depth gauge she was holding and grabbed another. "What happened to his eyes?" she asked quietly, not looking up from what she was doing.

Riley stopped working for a moment and looked up at her. When he didn't speak immediately, Gant raised her own eyes.

For a while, Riley seemed to evaluate her. Then, abruptly, he looked away.

"Not many people know what happened to his eyes," he said. "Hell, until today, not that many people had even seen his eyes."

There was a short silence.

"Is that why his call sign is Scarecrow?" Gant said softly. "Because of his eyes?"

Riley nodded. "Norman McLean gave it to him."

"The general?"

"The General. When McLean saw Schoneld's eves, he said he looked like a scarecrow McLean had once had guarding his cornfield back in Kansas. Apparently, it was one of those scarecrows that had two slits for each eye, you know, like a plus sign."

"Do you know how it happened?" Gant asked gently.

At first Riley didn't answer. Then, finally, he nodded. But he didn't say anything.

"What happened?"

Riley took a deep breath. He put down the helium compressor he was holding in his hand and looked at Gant. "Shane Schofield wasn't always in command of a ground Recon Unit," he began. "He used to be a pilot, based on the Wasp."

The USS. Wasp is the flagship of the United States Marine Corps. It is one of seven Landing Helicopter Dockships in the Corps, and it is the battle center for any major Marine expedition. Most casual observers mistake it for an aircraft carrier.

What a lot of people don't know about the Marine Corps is that it maintains a sizable aviation wing. Although this air wing is used primarily to transport troops, it is also used to support ground attacks. For this purpose it is equipped with lethal AH-1W Cobra Attack Helicopters?instantly recognizable because of their skinny shape?and British-made (but American-modified) AV-8B Harrier II fighter jets, or, as they are more widely known throughout the world, Harrier jump jets. Harriers are the only attack planes in the world with the ability to take off and land vertically.

"Schofield was a Harrier pilot on the Wasp. One of the best, so they tell me," Riley said. "He was in Bosnia in 1995, during the worst of the fighting there, flying patrol missions over the no-fly zone."

Gant watched Riley closely as he spoke. He was staring off into space as he recounted the story.

"One day, late in 1995, he got shot down by a mobile Serbian missile battery that Intelligence said didn't exist. I think they found out later that it was a two-man strike team in a jeep with six American-made Stingers in the backseat.

"Anyway," Book said, "Schofield managed to eject a second before the Stingers took out his fuel tanks. He came down bang in the middle of Serb-held territory."

Riley turned to face Gant.

"Our lieutenant survived for nineteen days in the Serbian woodlands?alone?while over a hundred Serbian troops swept the forest looking for him. When they found him, he hadn't eaten in ten days.

"They took him to a deserted farmhouse and tied him to a chair. Then they beat him with a wooden plank with nails stuck into it and asked him questions. Why was he flying over this area? Was he a spy plane? They wanted to know how much he knew about their positions because they thought he was up there providing air support for U.S. ground forces inside Serb territory."

"U.S. ground forces were inside Serbian territory?" Gant asked.

Riley nodded silently. "There were two SEAL teams in there. Carrying out covert surgical hits on Serbian leadership positions. Night hits. Good hits. They'd been causing chaos among the Serbs, absolute chaos. They'd be in and out before anyone knew they even existed. They'd go in, slash their victims' throats, and then vanish into the night. They were so good that some of the locals started saying they were ghosts come to haunt them for what they were doing to their own people."

Gant said, "Did Scarecrow know about them? The SEAL teams inside Serb territory?"

Book was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Yes. Officially, Schofield was patrolling the no-fly zone. Unofficially, he was sending grid coordinates of Serb leadership farmhouses to the SEALs on the ground. It didn't make any difference anyway. He never said a word."

Gant watched intently as Riley took a deep breath. He was building up to something.

"In any case," Book said, "the Serbs decided that Schofield had been carrying out reconnaissance for the SEAL teams, that he had been spotting strategic targets from the air and transmitting their coordinates to men on the ground. They decided that since he'd been seeing things that he wasn't supposed to be seeing, they would cut his eyes out."

"What?" Gant said.

Riley said, "They pulled a razor blade out of a drawer and they held him down. Then one of them stepped forward and slowly cut two vertical lines down across Schofield's eyes. Apparently, as he did it, the man with the razor blade quoted something from the Bible. Something about if your hand sins, cut it off, and if your eyes sin, cut them out."

Gant felt sick. They had blinded Schofield. "What did they do then?" she asked.

"They locked him in a cupboard and they let him bleed."

Gant was still shocked. "So how did he get out?"

"Jack Walsh sent a Recon team to go in and get him," Riley said.

Gant's ears pricked up at the name. Every Marine knew of Captain John T. Walsh. He was the captain of the Wasp, the most revered Marine in the Corps.

Some thought he should have been Commandant, the highest-ranking officer in the United States Marine Corps, but Walsh's history of disdain for any kind of politician had prevented that. The Commandant is required to liaise regularly with members of Congress, and everyone knew?Walsh more than anyone?that Jack Walsh wouldn't be able to stomach that. Besides, Walsh had said he would rather command the Wasp and liaise with soldiers. The Marines loved him for it.

Riley went on. "When Scott O'Grady got lifted out of Bosnia on 8 June 1995, they put him on the cover of Time magazine. He met the President. He did the whole PR thing.

"When Shane Schofield got lifted out of Bosnia five months later, nobody heard a thing. There were no TV cameras waiting on the deck of the Wasp to photograph him as he stepped off that helicopter. There were no newspaper reporters there to take down his story. Do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because when Shane Schofield landed on the Wasp after being extracted from that farmhouse in Bosnia by a team of United States Marines, he was the worst-looking thing you have ever seen.

"The extraction had been bloody. Fierce as hell. The Serbs hadn't wanted to give up their prized American pilot and they'd fought hard. When that chopper returned and hit the tarmac on the Wasp, it had four seriously wounded Marines on board. It also had Shane Schofield.

"The medics and the doctors and the support crews charged out and got everybody off the chopper as fast as they could. There was blood everywhere, wounded men screaming. Schofield was taken away on a gurney. He had blood pouring out of both of his eyes. The extraction had been so fast?so intense?that no one had even had a chance to put gauze patches over his eyes."

Riley paused. Gant just stared.

"What happened after that?" she asked.

"Jack Walsh copped shit from the White House and the Pentagon. They hadn't wanted him to send anyone in for Schofield because Schofield wasn't supposed to be there in the first place. The White House didn't want the 'political damage' that would follow from an American search-and-rescue mission for a downed spy plane. Walsh told them where to shove it, said they could fire him if they wanted to."

"What about Scarecrow? What happened to him?"

"He was blinded. His eyes had been ripped to shreds. They took him to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Maryland. It's got the best eye surgery unit in the country, or so they tell me."

"And?"

"And they fixed his eyes. Don't ask me how, 'cause I don't know how. Apparently, the razor blade cuts were fairly shallow, so there was no damage to his retinas. The real damage, they said, was to the outer extremities of his eyes?the irises and the pupils. Purely physical defects, they said. Defects which could be fixed." Riley shook his head. "I don't know what they did?some fancy new laser-fusing procedure, someone told me?but they did it; they fixed his eyes. Hell, all I know is that if you can afford it?and in Scarecrow's case, the Corps could?you don't need glasses these days.

"Of course, there was still the scarring on his skin, but otherwise, they did it. Schofield could see again. Twenty-twenty." Riley paused. "There was only one hitch."

"What was that?"

"The Corps wouldn't let him fly again," Riley said. "It's standard procedure across all the armed forces: once you've had eye trauma of any kind, you can't fly a military airplane. Hell, if you wear reading glasses, you're not allowed to fly a military kite."

"So what did Scarecrow do?"

Riley smiled. "He decided to become a line animal, a ground Marine. He was already an officer from his flying days, so he kept his commission. But that was all he kept. He had to start all over again. He went from flight status, Lieutenant Commander, to ground force, Lieutenant Second Class, in an instant.

"And he went back to school. Back to the Basic School at Quantico. And he did every course they had. He did tactical weapons training. He did strategic planning. Small arms, scout/sniper. You name it, he did it. He did it all. Apparently, he said he wanted to be like those men who'd come in and got him out of Bosnia. What they'd done for him he wanted to be able to do."

Riley shrugged. "As you can probably imagine, it didn't take long for him to get noticed. He was too clever to stay a Second Lieutenant for long. After a few months, they upped him to Full Lieutenant, and before long, they offered him a Recon Unit. He took it. That was almost two years ago now."

Gant had never known. She had been selected for Schofield's Recon Unit only a year ago, and it had never occurred to her to wonder how Schofield himself had become the team's commander. That sort of thing was officer stuff, and Gant wasn't an officer. She was enlisted, and enlisted troops know only what they are told to know. Things like the choice of team commander are left to the higher-ups.

"I've been in his team ever since," Riley said proudly.

Gant knew what he meant. Riley respected Schofield, trusted his judgment, trusted his appraisal of any given situation. Schofield was Riley's commander and Riley would follow him into hell.

Gant would, too. Ever since she had been in Schofield's Recon team, she had liked him. She respected him as a leader.

He was firm but fair, and he didn't mince words. And he had never treated her any differently from any of the men in the unit.

"You like him, don't you?" Riley said softly.

"I trust him," Gant said.

There was a short silence.

Gant sighed. "I'm twenty-six years old, Book. Did you know that?"

"No."

"Twenty-six years old. God," Gant said, lost in thought. She turned to Book. "Did you know I was married once?"

"No, I didn't."

"Got married at the ripe old age of nineteen, I did. Married the sweetest man you'd ever meet, the catch of the town. He was a new teacher at the local high school, just arrived from New York, taught English. Gentle guy, quiet. I was pregnant by the time I was twenty."

Book just watched Gant silently as she spoke.

"And then one day," Gant said, "when I was two and a half months pregnant I arrived home early to find him doing it doggy-style on the living room floor with a seventeen-year-old cheerleader who'd come round for tutoring."

Book winced inwardly.

"I miscarried three weeks later," Gant said. "I don't know what caused it. Stress, anxiety, who knows. I hated men after my husband did that to me. Hated them. That was when I enlisted in the Corps. Hate makes you a good soldier, you know. Makes you plant every single shot right in the middle of the other guy's head. I couldn't bring myself to trust a man after what my husband did. And then I met him."

Gant was staring off into space. Her eyes were beginning to fill with water.

"You know, when I was accepted into this unit, the selection committee put on this big celebration lunch at Pearl. It was beautiful, one of those great Hawaiian BBQ lunches? out on the beach, in the sun. He was there. He was wearing this horrible blue Hawaiian shirt and, of course, those silver sunglasses.

"I remember that at one point during the lunch everybody else was talking, but he wasn't. I watched him. He just seemed to bow his head and go into this inner world. He seemed so lonely, so alone. He caught me looking and we talked about something inane, something about what a great place Pearl Harbor was and what our favourite holiday spots were.

"But my heart had already gone out to him. I don't know what he was thinking about that day, but whatever it was, he was thinking hard about it. My guess is it was a woman, a woman he couldn't have.

"Book, if a man ever thought about me the way he was thinking about her..." Gant shook her head. "I would just ... Oh, I don't know. It was just so intense. It was like ... like nothing I have ever seen."

Book didn't say anything. He just stared at Gant.

Gant seemed to sense his eyes on her and she blinked twice and the water in her eyes disappeared.

"Sorry," she said. "Can't go showing my emotions now, can I. If I start doing that, people'll start calling me Dorothy again."

"You should tell him how you feel about him," Book said gently.

"Yeah, right" Gant said. "Like I'd do that. They'd kick me out of the unit before I could say, 'That's why you can't have women in frontline units.' Book, I'd rather be close to him and not be able to touch him than be far away and still not be able to touch him."

Book looked hard at Gant for a moment, as if he was appraising her. Then he smiled warmly. "You're all right... Dorothy, you know that. You're all right."

Gant snuffed a laugh. "Thanks."

She bowed her head and shook it sadly. Then suddenly she looked up at Book.

"I have one more question," she said.

"What?"

Gant cocked her head. "How is it that you know all that stuff about him? All the stuff about Bosnia and the farmhouse and his eyes and all that?"

Riley smiled sadly.

Then he said, "I was on the team that got him out."

"Any sort of paleontology is a waiting game," Sarah Hensleigh said as she trudged through the snow next to Schofield toward the outer perimeter of the station. "But now with the new technology, you just set the computer, walk away, and do something else. Then you come back later and see if the computer has found anything."

The new technology, Sarah had been saying, was a longwave sonic pulse that the paleontologists at Wilkes shot down into the ice to detect fossilized bones. Unlike digging, it located fossils without damaging them.

Schofield said, "So what do you do while you wait for the sonic pulse to find your next fossil?"

"I'm not just a paleontologist, you know," Sarah said, smiling, feigning offense. "I was a marine biologist before I took up paleontology. And before all this happened, I was working with Ben Austin in the Bio Lab on B-deck. He was doing work on a new antivenom for Enhydrina schistosa."

Schofield nodded. "Sea snake."

Sarah looked at him, surprised. "Very good, Lieutenant."

"Yeah, well, I'm not just a grunt with a gun, you know," Schofield said, smiling.

The two of them came to the outer perimeter of the station, where they found Montana standing on the skirt of one of the Marine hovercrafts. The hovercraft was facing out from the station complex.

It was dark?that eerie eternal twilight of winter at the poles?and through the driving snow Schofield could just make out the vast flat expanse of land stretching out in front of the stationary hovercraft. The horizon glowed dark orange

Behind Montana, on the roof of the hovercraft, Schofielc saw the hovercraft's range finder. It looked like a long-barreled gun mounted on a revolving turret, and it swept from side to side in a slow 180-degree arc. It moved slowly, taking about thirty seconds to make a complete sweep from left to right before beginning the return journey.

"I set them just like you said," Montana said, stepping down from the skirt so that he stood in front of Schofield "The other LCAC is at the southeast corner." LCAC was the official name for a Marine hovercraft. It stood for "Landing Craft?Air Cushioned." Montana was a stickler for formalities.

Schofield nodded. "Good."

Positioned as they were, the range finders on the hovercrafts now covered the entire landward approach to Wilkes Ice Station. With a range of over fifty miles, Schofield and his team would know well in advance if anybody was heading toward the station.

"Have you got a portable screen?" Schofield asked Montana.

"Right here." Montana offered Schofield a portable viewscreen that displayed the results of the range finders' sweeps.

It looked like a miniature TV with a handle on the left-hand side. On the screen, two thin green lines clocked slowly back and forth like a pair of windscreen wipers. As soon as an object crossed the range finders' beams, a blinking red dot would appear on the screen and the object's vital statistics would appear in a small box at the bottom of the screen.

"All right," Schofield said. "I think we're all set. I think it's time we found out what's down in that cave."

The trudge back to the main building took about five minutes. Schofield, Sarah, and Montana walked quickly through the falling snow. As they walked, Schofield told Sarah and Montana about his plans for the cave.

First of all, he wanted to verify the existence of the spacecraft itself. At this stage, there was no proof that anything was down there at all. All they had was the report of a single scientist from Wilkes who was himself now probably dead. Who knew what he had seen? That he had also been attacked soon after his sighting of the spacecraft?by enemies unknown?was another question that Schofield wanted answered.

There was a third reason, however, for sending a small team down to the cave. A reason that Schofield didn't mention to Sarah or Montana.

If anyone else did happen to make a play for the station?especially in the next few hours when the Marines were at their most vulnerable?and if they also managed to overcome what was left of Schofield's unit up in the station proper, then a second team stationed down in the cave might be able to provide an effective last line of defense.

For if the only entrance to the cave was by way of an underwater ice tunnel, then anybody wanting to penetrate it would have to get there by an underwater approach. Covert incursionary forces hate underwater approaches and for good reason: you never know what's waiting for you above the surface. The way Schofield saw it, a small team already stationed inside the cave would be able to pick off an enemy force, one by one, as they broke the surface.

Schofield, Sarah, and Montana came to the main entrance of the station. They trudged down the rampway and headed inside.

Schofield stepped onto the A-deck catwalk and immediately headed for the dining room. Rebound should have been back there by now?with Champion?and Schofield wanted to see if the French doctor had anything to say about Samurai's condition.

Schofield came to the dining room door and stepped inside.

He immediately saw Rebound and Champion standing at the table on which Samurai lay.

Both men looked up quickly as Schofield entered, their eyes wide as saucers. They looked like thieves caught with their hands in the till, caught in the middle of some illegal act.

There was a short silence.

And then Rebound said, "Sir. Samurai's dead."

Schofield frowned. He had known Samurai's condition was critical and that death was a possibility, but the way Rebound said it was?

Rebound stepped forward and spoke seriously. "Sir, he was dead when we got here. And the doc here says he didn't die from his injuries. He says ... he says it looks like Samurai was suffocated."

Pete Cameron was sitting in his car in the middle of the SETI parking lot. The searing desert sun beat down on him. Cameron pulled out his cellular and called Alison in D.C.

"How was it?" she asked.

"Riveting," he said, flicking through his notes of the SETI recording.

"Anything to go on?"

"Not really. Looks like they got a few words off a spy satellite, but it's all Greek to me."

"Did you write any of it down this time?"

Cameron looked at his notes.

"Yes, dear," he said. "But I'm not so sure it's worth anything."

"Tell me anyway," Alison said.

"All right," Cameron said, looking down at his notes.

COPY 134625

CONTACT LOST?> IONOSPHERIC DISTURB.

FORWARD TEAM

SCARECROW

-66.5

SOLAR FLARE DISRUPT. RADIO

115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST

HOW GET THERE SO?SECONDARY TEAM EN

ROUTE

Cameron read his notes aloud for her, word for word, substituting English for his own shorthand symbols.

"That's it?" Alison said when he was finished. "That's all?"

"That's it."

"Not much to go on."

"That's what I thought," Cameron said.

"Leave it with me," Alison said. "Where are you off to now?"

Cameron plucked a small white card off his dashboard. It was almost covered over by Post-its. It was a business card.

ANDREW WILCOX

Gunsmith

14 Newbury St, Lake Arthur, NM

Cameron said, "I thought that since I was down here in the Tumbleweed State, I'd check out the mysterious Mr. Wilcox."

"The mailbox guy?"

"Yeah, the mailbox guy."

Two weeks ago, someone had left this business card in Cameron's mailbox. Just the card. Nothing else. No message came with it, and nothing was written on it. At first, Cameron almost threw it in the trash as errant junk mail?really errant junk mail since it had come from New Mexico.

But then Cameron had received a phone call.

It was a male voice. Husky. He asked if Cameron had got the card.

Cameron said he had.

Then the man said that he had something that Cameron might like to look into. Sure, Cameron had said, would the man like to come to Washington to talk about it?

No. That was out of the question. Cameron would have to come to him. The guy was a real cloak-and-dagger type, super-paranoid. He said he was ex-Navy, or something like that.

"You sure he's not just another of your fans?" Alison said.

Pete Cameron's reputation from his investigative days at Mother Jones still haunted him. Conspiracy theorists liked to ring him up and say that they had the next Watergate on their hands or that they had the juice on some corrupt politician.

Usually they asked for money in return for their stories.

But this Wilcox character had not asked for money. Hadn't even mentioned it. And since Cameron was in the neighborhood ...

"He may well be," Cameron said. "But since I'm down here anyway, I might as well check him out."

"All right," Alison said. "But don't say I didn't warn you."

Cameron hung up and slammed the door of his car.

In the Post's offices in D.C., Alison Cameron hung up her phone and stared into space for a few seconds. It was midmorning and the office was a buzz of activity. The wide, low-ceilinged room was divided by hundreds of chest-high partitions, and in every one people were busily working away. Phones rang; keyboards clattered; people scurried back and forth.

Alison was dressed in a pair of cream pants, a white shirt, and a loosely tied black tie. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail.

After a few moments, she looked at the slip of paper on which she'd jotted down everything her husband had told her over the phone.

She read over each line carefully. Most of it was indecipherable jargon. Talk about Scarecrows, ionospheric disturbances, forward teams, and secondary teams.

Three lines, however, struck her.

-66.5

SOLAR FLARE DISRUPTING RADIO

115, 20 MINS, 12 SECS EAST

Alison frowned as she read the three lines again. Then she got an idea.

She quickly reached over to a nearby desk and grabbed a brown folio-sized book from the shelf above it. She looked at the cover: Bartholemew's Advanced Atlas of World Geography. She flipped some pages and quickly found the one she was looking for.

She ran her finger across a line on the page.

"Huh?" she said aloud. Another reporter at a desk nearby looked up from his work.

Alison didn't notice him. She just continued to stare at the page in front of her.

Her finger marked the point on the map designated latitude minus 66.5 degrees and longitude 115 degrees, 20 minutes, and 12 seconds east.

Alison frowned.

Her finger was pointing at the coastline of Antarctica.

The Marines gathered around the pool on E-deck in silence.

Montana, Gant, and Santa Cruz wordlessly shouldered into scuba tanks. All three wore black thermal-electric wet suits.

Schofleld and Snake watched them as they suited up. Rebound stood behind them. Book Riley walked off in silence toward the E-deck storeroom, to check on Mother.

A large black backpack?the French team's VLF transmitter that Santa Cruz had found during his search of the station?sat on the deck next to Schofield's feet.

The news of Samurai's death had rocked the whole team.

Luc Champion, the French doctor, had told Schofield that he had found traces of lactic acid in Samurai's trachea, or windpipe. That, Champion had said, was almost certain proof that Samurai had not died of his wounds.

Lactic acid in the trachea, Champion explained, evidenced a sudden lack of oxygen to the lungs, which the lungs then tried to compensate for by burning sugar, a process known as lactic acidosis. In other words, lactic acid in the trachea pointed to death due to a sudden lack of oxygen to the lungs, otherwise known as asphyxiation, or suffocation.

Samurai had not died from his wounds. He had died because his lungs had been deprived of oxygen. He had died because someone had cut off his air.

Someone had murdered Samurai.

In the time it had taken Schofield and Sarah to go out and meet with Montana at the perimeter of the station?the same time it took for Rebound to climb down to E-deck and collect Luc Champion?someone had gone into the dining room on A-deck and strangled Samurai.

The implications of Samurai's death hit Schofield hardest of all.

Someone among them was a killer.

But it was a fact that Schofield had not told the rest of the unit. He had only told them that Samurai had died. He hadn't told them how. He figured that if someone among them was a killer, it was better that that person not be aware that Schofield knew about him. Rebound and Champion had been sworn to silence.

As he watched the others suit up, Schofield thought about what had happened.

Whoever the killer was, he had expected that Samurai's death would probably be attributed to his wounds. It was a good assumption. Schofield figured that had he been told the Samurai hadn't made it, he would have immediately assumed that Samurai's body had simply given up the fight for life and died from its wounds. That was why the killer had suffocated Samurai. Suffocation left no blood, no telltale marks or wounds. If there were no other wounds on the body, the story that Samurai had simply lost the battle with his bullet wounds gained credence.

What the killer had not known, however, was that asphyiation did, in fact, leave a telltale sign?lactic acid in the trachea.

Schofield had no doubt that had he not had a doctor present at the station, the lactic acid would have gone unnoticed and Samurai's death would have been attributed to his bullet wounds. But there had been a doctor at the station. Luc Champion. And he had spotted the acid.

The implications were as chilling as they were endless.

Were there French soldiers still at large somewhere inside the station? Someone the Marines had missed. A lone soldier, maybe, who had decided to pick off the Marines one by one, starting with the weakest of their number, Samurai.

Schofield quickly dismissed the thought. The station, its surrounds, and even the remaining French hovercraft outside had been swept thoroughly. There were no more enemy soldiers either inside or outside Wilkes Ice Station.

That created a problem.

Because it meant that whoever had killed Samurai was someone Schofield thought he could trust.

It couldn't have been the French scientists, Champion and Rae. Since the end of the battle with the French they had been handcuffed to the pole on E-deck.

It could have been one of the scientists from Wilkes? while Schofield was outside with Montana and Hensleigh, they were all in their common room on B-deck, unguarded by any of the Marines. But why? Why on earth would one of the scientists want to kill a wounded Marine? They had nothing to gain from killing Samurai. The Marines were here to help them.

There still remained one other alternative.

One of the Marines had killed Samurai.

The mere possibility that that might have happened sent a chill down Schofield's spine. The fact that he had even considered it chilled him even more. But he considered it nonetheless, because aside from the residents of Wilkes, a Marine was the only other person in the station who'd had the opportunity to kill Samurai.

Schofield, Sarah, and Montana had been outside when it had happened, so Schofield was at least sure about them.

As for the other Marines, however, there were difficulties.

They had all been, more or less, working alone at different places in the station when the murder had occurred. Any one of them could have done it without being detected.

Schofield checked them off one by one.

Snake. He had been on C-deck, in the alcove, working on the destroyed winch controls that raised and lowered the station's diving bell. He had been alone.

Santa Cruz. He had been searching the station for French erasing devices. That search had turned up nothing but the VLF transmitter that now sat silently at Schofield's feet. He had also been alone.

Rebound. Schofield thought about the young private. Rebound was the prime suspect. Schofield knew it, Rebound himself knew it. He was the one who had said to Schofield that Samurai was stable enough for him to go down to E-deck and fetch Champion. He was also the only one who had been with Samurai since the battle had ended. For all Schofield knew Samurai had been dead for over an hour, killed by Rebound long ago.

But why? It was this question that Schofield just couldn't figure out. Rebound was young, twenty-one. He was fresh and green and eager. He followed orders immediately, and he wasn't old enough to be jaded or cynical. The kid loved being a Marine, and he was as genuine a kid as Schofield had ever met. Schofield had thought that he had a good measure of Rebound's character. Maybe he hadn't.

The thought of Rebound as the killer did, however, trigger one other unusual thought in Schofield's mind. It was a memory, a painful memory that Schofield had tried to bury.

Andrew Trent.

Lieutenant First Class Andrew X. Trent, USMC. Call sign, "Hawk."

Peru. March 1997.

Schofield had gone through Officer Candidate School with Andy Trent. They were good friends, and after OCS they had risen to the rank of First Lieutenant together. A brilliant strategic thinker, Trent was given command of a prized Atlantic-based Marine Reconnaissance Unit. Schofield?not quite the tactical genius that Trent was?was awarded a Pacific-based one.

In March of 1997, barely a month after he had taken command of his Recon Unit, Schofield and his team were ordered to attend a battle scene in the mountains of Peru. Apparently, something of tremendous importance had been discovered in an ancient Incan temple high in the Andes and the Peruvian President had called upon the United States for aid. Bands of murderous treasure hunters are rife in the mountains of Peru; they have been known to kill whole teams of university researchers in order to steal the priceless artifacts that the researchers find.

When Schofield's unit arrived at the mountain top site, they were met by a squad of American troops, a single platoon of U.S. Army Rangers. The Rangers had formed a two-mile perimeter around a particular rain forest-covered mountain. On top of the mountain stood the crumbling ruins of a pyramid-shaped Incan temple, half-buried in the mountainside.

A Marine Recon Unit was already inside the temple, the captain of the Rangers informed Schofield.

Andy Trent's unit.

Apparently, it had been the first unit to arrive on the scene. Trent and his team had been doing some exercises in the jungles of Brazil when the alarm had been raised, so they had been the first to arrive.

The Army Ranger Captain didn't know anything else about what was going on inside the ruined temple. All he knew was that all other units arriving at the scene had been ordered to secure a two-mile perimeter around the temple and not to enter it for any reason.

Schofield's unit went about doing what they had been ordered to do, and before long they had reinforced the two-mile perimeter around the temple.

It was then that a new unit arrived on the scene.

This unit, however, was allowed to pass through the perimeter. It was a SEAL team, someone said, a bomb squad of some kind that was going in to defuse some mines that had been laid by whoever was in there with Trent's Marines. Apparently, there had been heavy fighting inside. Trent and his team had prevailed, Schofield was pleased to hear.

The SEAL team went inside. Time passed slowly.

And then suddenly Schofield's earpiece had exploded to life. A garbled voice cut through waves of static.

It said, "This is Lieutenant Andrew Trent, Commander of United States Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit Four. I repeat, this is Andrew Trent of U.S. Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit Four. If there are any Marines out there, please respond."

Schofield responded.

Trent didn't seem to hear him. He could transmit, but he obviously couldn't receive.

Trent said, "If there are any Marines outside this temple, raid it now! I repeat, raid it now! They planted men in my unit! They planted men inside my goddamn unit! Marines, those SEALs who came in here before, they said that they were here to help me. They said they were a special unit, sent by Washington to assist me in securing this site. Then they pulled their guns and shot one of my corporals right in the fucking head! And now they're trying to kill me! Fuck! Some of my own men are helping them, for God's sake! They planted fucking men in my unit! They planted men in my own goddamned unit! I'm being attacked by my own?"

The signal cut off abruptly.

Schofield had quickly looked about him. No one else, it seemed, had heard the short, sharp message. Trent must have transmitted it over the "Officer-Only" frequency, which meant that only Schofield had heard it.

Schofield didn't care. He immediately ordered his unit to mobilize, but as soon as they were ready and starting to head for the temple, they were cut off by the Army Rangers. The Rangers were a force of fifty men. Schofield's was only twelve.

The Ranger Captain spoke firmly. "Lieutenant Schofield, my orders are clear. No one goes in there. No one. If anyone tries to enter that building, my orders are to shoot them on sight. If you try to enter that building, Lieutenant, I will be forced to open fire on you." His voice went cold. "Have no doubt that I will, Lieutenant. I won't think twice about offing a dozen faggot Marines."

Schofield had glared at the Ranger Captain.

He was a tall man, about forty, a career frontline soldier, fit but barrel-chested, with a full head of crew-cut gray hair. He had cold, lifeless eyes and a weathered, sneering face. Schofield remembered his name?would always remember it?remembered the bastard stating it in a robotic, staccato manner after Schofield had demanded it from him: Captain Arlin F. Brookes, United States Army.

And so Schofield and his team were held back at the perimeter while Andrew Trent's voice continued to shout desperately over Schofield's helmet intercom.

The more Trent shouted, the more furious and frustrated Schofield became.

The SEAL team that had gone inside had killed more of his men, Trent said. Some of his own men had then joined them and turned on him and killed others in his unit from point-blank range. Trent didn't know what was going on.

The last thing Schofield heard over his helmet intercom that day was Trent saying that he was the last one left.

Andrew Trent never came out of the temple.

About a year later, after making some inquiries, Schofield was told that Trent's unit had arrived at that temple only to find no one there. There was no battle, Schofield was told, no fighting with anyone. No "mysterious discovery" in the first place. Upon arriving at the temple and finding it empty, Trent and his team had investigated the dark, dank ruins. It was during that search that a few men?Trent included?fell down a concealed plug hole. It was estimated that the plug hole was at least a hundred feet deep, with sheer rock walls. No one had survived the fall. A search had apparently been made, and all the bodies had been recovered.

Except Trent's, Schofield had been told. Andrew Trent's body was never found.

It made Schofield furious. Officially, nothing had ever happened at that temple. Nothing but a tragic accident that had claimed the lives of twelve United States Marines.

Schofield knew he was the only one who had heard Trent's voice over the radio system, knew no one would believe him if he ever questioned what had happened. If he said anything, it would probably only win him a quiet court-martial and an even quieter dishonorable discharge.

And so Schofield had never mentioned the incident to anyone.

But now, in the cold confines of an underground ice station in the Antarctic, it was coming back to haunt him.

"They planted men in my unit!... They planted fucking men in my unit!"

Trent's words echoed inside Schofield's head as he thought about whether Rebound had killed Samurai.

Had they also planted men inside his unit?

And who were "they" anyway? The U.S. Government? The U.S. military?

It sounded like something that might have happened in the old Soviet Union. A government planting "special" men inside elite units. But then, as Schofield knew, the United States and the USSR had not really been all that different. The U.S. had always accused the Soviets of indoctrination while at the same time they played "The Star-Spangled Banner" every single morning in schools across America.

The thought of disloyal men inside his unit made Schofield's skin crawl.

He continued with his mental checklist.

Hell, even Riley and Gant?engaged in the preparation of the scuba gear down on E-deck?had occasionally separated. Every so often, Riley would go and eheck on Mother.

Schofield couldn't believe that Book Riley was a traitor. He had known him for too long.

But Gant? Schofield thought he knew, Libby Gant, thought he had her measure, too. He had chosen Gant himself for the unit. Could that have been anticipated by someone else? By someone who had wanted her in Schofield's unit. No....

The only other Marine alive at the station was Mother. And the mere prospect that she could have killed Samurai was absurd.

Schofield's head was spinning. All he knew for sure was that Samurai Lau was dead and that someone among them had killed him. The problem was, they all could have done it.

Montana, Gant, and Santa Cruz were ready to dive.

Strapped to their backs were Navy-made low-audibility air tanks, or, as they are more colloquially known in the Marine Corps, "stealth tanks."

Water is a great conductor of sound, and regular scuba tanks make a lot of noise as they pump compressed air through their hoses to a diver's mouthpiece. Any commercial underwater microphone will detect a diver by the loud hisssssing noise that his breathing gear makes.

With this in mind, the U.S. Navy has spent millions of dollars developing a silent self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. The result is a scuba system known as LABA?low-audibility breathing apparatus. Scuba tanks that are all but noiseless underwater. LABA tanks are undetectable to conventional audio detection systems, hence the comparison with stealth aircraft.

Schofield watched the three Marines as they reached for their face masks and prepared to jump into the murky pool. Then he turned and scanned the pool, empty save for the diving bell that hovered out in the center. The pod of killer whales had left the area about forty minutes ago and hadn't been seen since. As he gazed at the pool, however, he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. Schofield turned.

And saw Sarah Hensleigh standing in front of him. Dressed in a figure-hugging blue-and-black thermal-electric wet suit. Schofield was momentarily taken aback. For the first time that day, he noticed just how shapely Sarah Hensleigh was?the woman had a great body.

Schoheld raised his eyebrows.

"This is what I wanted to ask you about before," Sarah said. "When we were outside. But I never got a chance. I want to go down with them."

"I can see that," Schofield said.

"This station lost nine people down in that cave. I'd likd to know why."

Schofield looked from Hensleigh to the three Marine divers on his left. He frowned, doubtful.

"I can help," Sarah said quickly. "With the cave, for example."

"How?"

"Ben Austin?one of the divers who went down there at the very start?said it was an underground cavern of some sort, right?" Sarah said. "He said it had sheer ice walls and that it stretched off for several hundred feet." Sarah stared at Schofield. "My guess is that if the walls in that cave are sheer, then it's a good bet that the cave was formed by some kind of seismic event in the past, some kind of earthquake or undersea volcanic eruption. Sheer walls are created by sudden upthrusts of rock, not slow, gradual movement."

"I'm sure my men will be safe from sudden upthrusts of rock, Dr. Hensleigh."

"All right then. I can tell you what's down there," Sarah said.

That got Schofield's attention. He turned to the three divers standing by the edge of the pool. "Montana, Gant, Cruz. Just hold on a minute, will you?" Schofield turned back to face Sarah Hensleigh, his eyes serious. "All right, Dr. Hensleigh, tell me what's down there?"

"All right," Sarah said as she collected her thoughts. She'd obviously thought about this a lot, but now Schofield had put her on the spot.

"Theory One," she said. "It's alien. It's a spacecraft from another planet, from another civilization. Now, that's not really my field?it's not really anyone's field. But if that thing is alien then I'd give my right arm to see it."

"Mother already gave her left leg. What else?"

"Theory Two," Sarah said, "it's not alien."

"It's not alien?" Schofield raised an eyebrow. That's right," Sarah said. "It's not alien. Now this theory, this theory really is my field. This is pure paleontology. It's not a new theory by any means, but until now, no one's been able to find any evidence to prove it."

"Prove what?"

Sarah took a deep breath. "The theory goes that once, a long time ago, there was civilized life on Earth."

She paused, not for effect, but rather to wait for Schofield's reaction.

At first, Schofield didn't say anything, he just thought about it for a moment. Then he looked at her hard. "Go on."

"I'm talking about a long time ago," Sarah said, gaining momentum. "I'm talking before the dinosaurs. I'm talking four hundred million years ago. Now, when you think about it... when you think about it in terms of human evolution, it's really very possible.

"Human life as we know it has been on Earth for less than a million years, right? Historically speaking, that's not a long time. If the history of the Earth were the twenty-four hours in a day, then the period of modern human presence would amount to about three seconds. What we would call civilized human life?human life in its Homo sapiens form?has been here for an even shorter period of time, not even twenty thousand years. That's less than a second on the world's time clock."

Schofield watched Sarah Hensleigh closely as she spoke. She was excited, speaking quickly. She was in her element.

"What paleontologists usually say," she said, "is that a whole matrix of factors contributed to the rise of the mammals, and hence the rise of human life on Earth. The right distance from the sun, the right temperature, the right atmosphere, the right oxygen levels in the atmosphere, and, of course, the extinction of the dinosaurs. We all know about the Alvarez theory, how an asteroid slammed into the Earth and killed all the dinosaurs and how the mammals rose out of the darkness and took their place as the rulers of the world. What if I was to tell you that there is evidence that there were at least four other such asteroid impacts on this planet in the last seven hundred million years."

"Asteroid impacts," Schofield said.

"Yes. Sir Edmund Halley once suggested that the entire Caspian Sea was created by an asteroid collision hundreds of millions of years ago. Alexander Bickerton, the famous New Zealand physicist who taught Rutherford, hypothesized that the seabed of the entire South Atlantic Ocean?between South Africa and South America?was one great big bowl-shaped crater, caused by a massive asteroid impact over three hundred million years ago.

"Now, if we assume?as we so readily do in the case of the dinosaurs?that every time one of these cataclysmic asteroids hit the Earth a civilization died, we can only ask, what other kinds of civilizations, like that of the dinosaurs, have also been destroyed? What several academics have suggested in recent years?Joseph Sorenson from Stanford is the most well known?is that one of these civilizations may have been human."

Schofield looked at the other Marines on the deck around him. They were all listening to Sarah intensely, rapt in her story.

Sarah went on. "You see, on average, the Earth tilts on its vertical axis half a degree every twenty-two thousand years. What Sorenson postulated was that about four hundred million years ago the Earth was tilted at an angle not unlike the angle it's tilted on today. It was also no farther from the sun than it is now, so it had similar mean temperatures. Ice core samples, like the ones we get from this station, have shown that the air was a mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, in quantities very similar to that of our own atmosphere today. Don't you see it? The matrix was the same then as it is now."

Schofield was slowly beginning to believe what Sarah was saying.

Sarah said, "That cavern down there is fifteen hundred feet below sea level; that's two-and-a-half thousand feet below the average land level of Antarctica. The ice down there is easily four hundred million years old. If it's upthrusted ice from deeper down?ice that was raised by an earthquake or something?then it could be a lot, lot older.

"I think that whatever is down there is something that was frozen a long time ago. A long time ago. It could be alien; it could be human, from human life that existed on this planet millions of years ago. Either way, Lieutenant, it'll be the greatest paleontological discovery this world has ever known and I want to see it."

Sarah stopped, took a deep breath.

Schofield just stood there, silent.

Sarah spoke softly. "Lieutenant, this is my life. This is my whole life. Whatever's down there is perhaps the greatest discovery in the history of mankind. I've been studying my whole life for this?"

Schofield looked curiously at her, and she cut herself off, sensing that he was about to speak.

"What about your daughter?" he said.

Sarah cocked her head. She hadn't expected him to ask that.

Schofield said, "You're willing to leave her up here alone?"

"She'll be safe," Sarah said evenly. Then she smiled. "She'll be up here with you."

Schofield hadn't seen Sarah Hensleigh smile before. It illuminated her face, lit up the whole room.

Sarah said, "I'll also be able to identify our divers who went down to that cave before, which might be?"

Schofield held up his hand. "It's all right; you convinced me. You can go. But you use our scuba gear. I don't know what happened to your people down there before, but I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever's down there heard the noise of their breathing gear and I don't want the same thing to happen to us."

"Thank you, Lieutenant," Sarah said seriously. "Thank you." Then she took off the glistening silver locket that she wore around her neck and offered it to Schofield. "I'd better not dive with this on. Can you keep it for me until I get back?"

Schofield took the locket, put it in his pocket. "Sure."

Just then, there came a sudden groaning sound from the pool to his left.

Schofield spun, just in time to see an enormous black shadow rise to the surface of the pool amid a cloud of frothing white bubbles.

At first he thought the black shadow was one of the killer whales, returning to the pool in search of more food. But whatever it was, it wasn't swimming. It was just floating, rising up and up toward the surface.

And then the enormous black object breached the surface with a loud shooshing sound. Waves and bubbles shot out from every side of it. White froth expanded all around it. Narrow rivulets of blood snaked their way through the froth. The massive black object bobbed on the surface. Everyone on the deck took a step forward.

Schofield stared at the black object in awe.

It was a killer whale.

But it was dead. Well and truly dead. The huge black-and-white carcass just floated limply in the water, alongside the deck. It was one of the larger ones, too, possibly even the male of the pack. It must have been at least thirty feet long. Seven tons in weight.

At first Schofield thought it must have been the killer whale that Mother had shot in the head during the battle? since that was the only whale that he knew for sure was dead. He quickly changed his mind.

This dead whale had no visible wound in its head. The one Mother had shot would have had a hole the size of a basketball in its skull. This one's forehead was unmarked.

And there was another thing.

This one had floated to the surface.

An animal killed in water will initially float, until its body fills with water. Only then will it sink. The killer whale that Mother had killed would have long since sunk to the bottom. This whale, on the other hand, had been killed recently.

The dead carcass rolled slowly in the water. Schofield and the other Marines on the deck just stared at it, entranced.

And then, slowly, it rolled belly-up and Schofield saw the great whale's white underbelly and his jaw dropped.

Two long bloody gashes ran down the length of the big whale's underbelly.

They ran in parallel. Two jagged uneven slashes that ran all the way up the center of the whale's body, from its mid-section to its throat. Sections of the big whale's intestines had fallen out through the gashes?long, ugly cream-colored coils that were as thick as a man's arm.

They weren't clean cuts either, Schofield saw. Each gash was a tear, a rip. Something had punctured the whale's belly and then ripped up the entire length of its body, tearing the skin apart.

Everyone on the deck stared at the bloody carcass, the understanding visible on their faces.

There was something down in that water.

Something that had killed a killer whale.

Schofield took a deep breath and turned to face Sarah. "Want to reconsider?" he said.

Sarah stared at the dead killer whale for a few seconds. Then she looked back at Schofield.

"No," she said. "No way."

Schofield paced nervously around the pool deck, alone.

He watched as in the middle of the pool the winch's cable plunged into the water. At the end of that cable was the diving bell, and inside the diving bell were three of his Marines plus Sarah Hensleigh. The cable entered the water at a steady speed, as fast as it could go.

The winch had been lowering the diving bell into the water for almost an hour now. Three thousand feet was a long way, almost a kilometer, and Schofield knew it would take some time before it reached that depth.

Schofield stood on the deserted deck. Twenty minutes earlier, he had sent Book, Snake, and Rebound topside to try to raise McMurdo Station on the portable radio again?he had to know when a full-strength American force was going to arrive at Wilkes.

Now he stood alone on E-deck, the station around him silent save for the rhythmic mechanical thumping of the winch mechanism up on C-deck. The repetitive thump-thump-thump of the winch had an almost soothing effect on him.

Schofield pulled Sarah Hensleigh's silver locket out of his pocket. It glistened in the white fluorescent light of the station. He turned it over in his hand. There was some writing engraved on the back of it?

And then suddenly there came a noise and Schofield's head snapped round. It had only lasted for an instant, but he had definitely heard it.

It had been a voice. A male voice. But a voice that had been speaking in...

.. . French.

Schofield's eyes fell instantly upon the VLF transmitter that sat on the deck a few feet away from him.

Suddenly the transmitter emitted a shrill whistling sound. And then the voice came again.

"La hyène, c'est moi, le requin," the voice said. "La hyène, c'est moi, le requin. Présentez votre rapport. Je renouvele. Présentez votre rapport."

Rebound, Schofield thought. Shit. I need Rebound. But he was outside with the others and Schofield needed a French speaker now.

"Rebound," Schofield said into his helmet mike.

The reply came back immediately. "Yes, sir?" Schofield could hear the swirling wind in the background.

"Don't say a word, Rebound. Just listen, OK," Schofield said, pressing a button on his belt that kept his helmet microphone switched on. He leaned in close to the VLF transmitter so that his helmet mike was near the transmitter's speaker.

The French voice came again.

"La hyène. Vous avez trois heures pour présenter votre rapport. Je renouvele, Vous avez trois heures pour présenter votre rapport. Si vous ne le presentez pas lorsque I'heure nous serons contraint de lancer l'engine d'efface. Je renouvele. Si vous ne le présentez pas lorsque I'heure nous serons contraint de lancer l'engine d'efface. C'est moi, le requin. Finis."

The signal cut off and there was silence. When he was sure that it was finished, Schofield said, "Did you get all that, Rebound?"

"Most of it, sir."

"What did they say?"

"They said: Hyena. You have three hours to report. If you do not report by that time we will be compelled to launch the 'l'engine d'efface,' the erasing device."

"The erasing device," Schofield said flatly. "Three hours. You sure about that, Rebound?"

Schofield grabbed his wristwatch as he spoke. It was an old Casio digital. He started the stopwatch on it. The seconds began to tick upward.

"Very sure, sir. They said it all twice," Rebound said.

Schofield said, "Good work, Private. All right. Now all we have to do is figure out where these guys are?"

"Uh, excuse me, sir?" It was Rebound again.

"What is it?"

"Sir, I think I have an idea where they might be."

"Where?"

"Sir, at the end of that transmission we just heard, they said 'c'est moi, le requin'. Now, I missed the start of the transmission. Did they say that at the very beginning? 'C'est moi, le requin'?"

Schofield didn't know; he didn't speak French. It had all sounded the same to him. He tried to replay the radio message in his head. "They may have," he said. "No, wait, yes. Yes, I think they did say that. Why?"

Rebound said, "Sir, le requin is French for 'shark.' 'C'est moi le requin' means 'this is Shark.' You know, like a military code name. The French unit here at the station was called Hyena and that one we just heard was called Shark. You know what I'm thinking, sir?"

"Oh, damn," Schofield said.

"That's right. I'm thinking they're out on the water somewhere. Somewhere off the coast. I'll bet you a million bucks that Shark is a warship or something sailing off the coast of Antarctica."

"Oh, damn," Schofield said again, this time with feeling.

It made sense that whoever sent that message was a ship of some kind. And not just because of its code name. As Schofield knew, because of their extraordinarily long wavelengths, VLF transmissions were commonly used by surface vessels or submarines out in the middle of the ocean. That was why the French commandos had brought the VLF transmitter with them. To keep in contact with their warship off the coast.

Schofield started to feel ill.

The prospect of a frigate or a destroyer patrolling the ocean a hundred miles off the coast was bad. Very bad. Especially if it was aiming some kind of weapon?in all likelihood, a battery of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles?at Wilkes Ice Station.

It had never occurred to him that the French might not bring an erasing device with them but would rather leave it with an outside agent?like a destroyer off the coast?with instructions to fire upon the station if that destroyer did not receive a report by a given time.

Shit, Schofield thought. Shit. Shit. Shit.

There were only two things in the world that could stop the launch of that erasing device. One, a report coming in from twelve dead Frenchmen sometime within the next three hours. That wasn't going to happen.

Which meant the second option was the only option.

Schofield had to get in contact with the U.S. forces at McMurdo Station. And not just to find out when American reinforcements would be arriving at Wilkes. No, now he had to tell the Marines at McMurdo about a French warship sailing somewhere off the coast with a phalanx of cruise missiles trained on Wilkes Ice Station. It would then be up to the people at McMurdo to take out that warship?within three hours.

Schofield keyed his mike again. "Book, you hear all that?"

"Yeah," Buck Riley's voice said.

"Any luck with McMurdo?"

"Not yet."

"Keep trying," Schofield said. "Over and over. Until you get them on the line. Gentlemen, the stakes in this game have just been raised. If we don't get through to McMurdo in less than three hours, we're all gonna be vaporized."

"Scarecrow, this is Fox," Gant's voice said. "I repeat. Scarecrow, this is Fox. Hey, Scarecrow? Are you out there?"

Schofield was out on the pool deck on E-deck, watching the cable descend into the pool, thinking about cruise missiles. It had been about ten minutes since he had heard the transmission from the French vessel, Shark. Book, Rebound, and Snake were all still outside trying to raise McMurdo.

Schofield keyed his mike. "I hear you, Fox. How are you doing down there?"

"We are coming to three thousand feet. Preparing to stop the cable."

There was a short pause.

"OK. We are stopping the cable... now."

As Gant said the word "now," the cable plunging into the water suddenly jolted to a stop. She had stopped its descent from inside the diving bell.

"Scarecrow, I have the time as 1410 hours," Gant said. "Please confirm."

"I confirm the time as 1410 hours, Fox," Schofield said. It was standard deep-diving practice to confirm the time at which a dive was to start. Schofield didn't know that he was following exactly the same procedure that the scientists from Wilkes had followed only two-and-a-half days earlier.

"Copy time at 1410 hours. Turning over to self-contained air. Preparing to leave the diving bell."

Gant kept Schofield updated on the dive.

The four divers?Gant, Montana, Santa Cruz, and Sarah Hensleigh?turned over to self-contained air without incident and left the diving bell. A few minutes later, Gant reported that they had found the entrance to the underwater ice tunnel and that they were beginning their ascent.

Schofield continued to pace around the deck, deep in thought.

He thought about the divers from Wilkes who had disappeared down in the cavern, about the cavern itself and what was in it, about the French and their snatch-and-grab effort to seize whatever was down there, about erasing devices being fired from warships off the coast, about the possibility that one of his own men had killed Samurai, and about Sarah Hensleigh's smile. It was all too much.

His helmet intercom crackled to life. "Sir, Book here."

"Any luck?"

"Not a goddam thing, sir."

For the last quarter of an hour, Book, Snake, and Rebound had been trying to raise McMurdo Station on the unit's portable radio. They were doing it from just outside the main entrance to the station, as if being outside the structure might somehow help the signal get through.

"Interference?" Schofield asked.

"Mountains of it," Book said sadly.

Schofield thought for a moment. Then he said, "Book. Cancel that option and come back inside. I want you to go and find the scientists who are still here. I think they're in that common room on B-deck. See if you can find out if any of them are familiar with the radio system here."

"I copy that, sir."

Book's voice switched off and Schofield's intercom was silent again. Schofield stared at the pool of water at the base of the station and resumed his thoughts.

He thought about Samurai's death and who could have done it. At the moment, he trusted only two people: Montana and Sarah Hensleigh, since they had been with him when Samurai had been murdered. They were the only two people who Schofield knew for certain were not involved in Samurai's murder. As far as everybody else was concerned, they were all under suspicion.

Which was why Schofield had decided to keep Book, Snake, and Rebound all together. If one of them was the killer, he wouldn't be able to kill again with the other two around....

Suddenly a new thought hit Schofield and he keyed his mike again. "Book, you still out there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Book, while you're down on B-deck, I want you to ask those scientists something else," Schofield said. "I want you to ask if any of them knows anything about weather."

The radio room at Wilkes Ice Station is situated in the southeast corner of A-deck, directly across the shaft from the dining room. It houses the station's satellite telecommunications gear and short-range radio transmitters. Four radio consoles? each consisting of a microphone, a computer screen and keyboard, and some frequency dials?were in the room, two to each side.

Abby Sinclair was sitting at one of the radio consoles when Schofield entered the radio room.

The first thing Schofield noticed was that Abby Sinclair had not borne the recent events at Wilkes Ice Station at all well. Abby was a pretty woman in her late thirties, with long, frizzy brown hair and large brown eyes. Long vertical streaks of black mascara ran down from beneath both of her eyes. They reminded Schofield of the two scars that cut down across his own eyes?now hidden once again, behind his opaque silver glasses.

Next to Abby stood the three other Marines?Riley, Rebound, and Snake. Abby Sinclair was the only scientist in the room.

Schofield turned to Book. "Nobody knows anything about weather?"

"On the contrary," Book said. "You're in luck. Lieutenant Shane Schofield, I'd like you to meet Miss Abby Sinclair. Miss Sinclair is both the radio expert at this station and its resident meteorologist."

Abby Sinclair said, "Actually, I'm not the real radio expert. Carl Price was, but he... disappeared down in the cave before. I just help him out with the radio gear, so I guess I'm it now."

Schofield smiled reassuringly at her. "That's good enough for me, Miss Sinclair. Is it OK if I call you Abby?"

She nodded.

Schofield said, "All right. Abby, I have two problems, and I'm hoping that you can help me with both of them. I need to get in contact with my superiors at McMurdo as soon as possible. I need to tell them what's happened here so that they can send in the cavalry, if they haven't done so already. Now, we've been trying to raise McMurdo on our portable radio, but we can't get through. Question One: does the radio system here work?"

Abby smiled weakly. "It was working. I mean, before all this started. But then the solar flare kicked in and disrupted all our transmissions. In the end, though, that didn't matter because our antenna went down in the storm and we never got a chance to fix it."

"That's OK," Schofield said. "We can fix that."

Something else that she had said, however, troubled him. Schofield had been told about the "solar flare" phenomenon on his way to Wilkes, but he didn't know exactly what it was. All he knew was that it disrupted the electromagnetic spectrum and, in doing so, prevented any sort of radio communication.

"Tell me about solar flares," he said to Abby.

"There isn't really much to tell," Abby replied. "We don't really know that much about them. Solar flare is actually the term used to describe a brief high-temperature explosion on the surface of the sun, what most people would call a sunspot. When a sunspot occurs, it emits a huge amount of ultraviolet radiation. A huge amount. Like ordinary heat from the sun, this radiation travels through space toward the Earth. When it gets here, it contaminates our ionosphere, turning it into a thick blanket of electromagnetic mayhem. Satellites become useless because radio signals from the Earth can't penetrate the contaminated ionosphere. Similarly, signals coming from satellites down to the Earth can't get through the ionosphere either. Radio communication becomes impossible."

Abby suddenly looked about her. Her eyes fell on one of the computer screens next to her. "Actually, we have some weather-monitoring gear in here. If you'll just give me a minute, I might be able to show you what I mean."

"Sure," Schofield said as Abby switched on the computer next to her.

The computer hummed to life. Once it was up and running, Abby clicked through various screens until she came to the one she wanted. It was a satellite map of southeastern Antarctica, overlaid with multicolored patches. A barometric weather map. Like the ones on the evening news.

"This is a snapshot of the eastern Antarctic weather system for"?Abby looked at the date in the corner of the screen? "two days ago." She looked around at Schofield. "It was probably one of the last ones we got before the solar flare moved in and cut us off from the weather satellite."

She clicked her mouse. Another screen came up. "Oh, wait; here's another one. There it is," she said.

It filled half the screen.

An enormous yellow-white blob of atmospheric disturbance. It filled the entire left-hand side of the map, smothering nearly half of the pictured Antarctic coastline. In real terms, Schofield thought, the solar flare must have been absolutely enormous.

"And that is your solar flare, Lieutenant," Abby said. She turned to look at Schofield. "It must have moved eastward after this shot was taken and covered us, too."

Schofield stared at the yellow-white blob superimposed on the Antarctic coastline. There were slight discolorations in it, red and orange patches, even some black ones.

Abby said, "Since they usually explode in one section of the sun's surface, solar flares usually only affect defined areas. One station might have a total radio blackout while another, two hundred miles away, will have all of its systems working just fine."

Schofield stared at the screen. "How long do they last?"

Abby shrugged. "A day. Sometimes two. However long it takes for all the radiation to make the trip from the sun to the Earth. Depends on how large the original sunspot was."

"How long will this one last?"

Abby turned back to face her computer. She looked at the depiction of the solar flare on the screen, pursed her lips in thought.

"I don't know. It's a big one. I'd say about five days," she said.

A short silence followed as what she said sank in to everyone in the room.

"Five days," Rebound breathed from behind Schofield.

Schofield was frowning in thought. Abby: "You say it disrupts the ionosphere, right?"

"Right."

"And the ionosphere is ..."

"The layer of the Earth's atmosphere about 50 to 250 miles up," Abby said. "It's called the ionosphere because the air in it is filled with ionized molecules."

Schofield said, "OK. So, a solar flare explodes on the surface of the sun and the energy it emits travels down to Earth, where it disrupts the ionosphere, which turns into a shield through which radio signals can't pass, right?"

"Right."

Schofield looked at the screen again and stared at the black splotches on the yellow-white graphic representation of the solar flare. There was one larger black hole in the middle of the yellow-white blob that held his attention.

"Is it uniform?" he asked.

"Uniform?" Abby blinked, not comprehending.

"Is the shield uniform in its strength? Or does it have weak points, inconsistencies, breaks in the shield that could be penetrated by radio signals? Like these black spots here."

Abby said, "It would be possible to penetrate them, but it would be difficult. The break in the flare would have to be directly over this station."

"Uh-huh," Schofield said. "Is there any way that you could figure out when or if one of those breaks would be directly over us? Like, maybe, this one here."

Schofield pointed at the large black hole in the center of the yellow-white blob.

Abby studied the screen, evaluated the possibilities.

Finally, she said, "There might be a way. If I can bring up some previous images of the flare, I should be able to plot how fast it's traveling across the continent and in what direction. If I can do that, then I should be able to make a rough plot of its course."

"Just do what you can," Schofield said, "and call me if you find anything. I want to know when one of those breaks is going to pass over this station, so we can be ready to send a radio signal to McMurdo when it does."

"You'll have to fix the antenna outside?"

"I'm already on it," Schofield said. "You just find me a break in that flare. We'll get your antenna up again."

In Washington, Alison Cameron was also sitting in front of a computer.

She was in a small computer lab in the Post's offices. A microcrofilm viewing machine sat in the corner. Filing cabinets lined two of the four walls. Half a dozen computers filled the rest of the space in the small lab.

Alison found the screen she was looking for. The All-States Library Database.

There is a popular urban myth that the FBI has a tap on every library borrowing computer in the country and they use this facility to track down serial killers. The killer quotes Lowell at a homicide scene, so the FBI checks up on every library in the country to see who's been borrowing Lowell. Like all good urban myths, this is only a half-truth. There is a system (it is an updatable CD-ROM service) that cross-links every library computer in the country, telling the user where a certain book can be found. It doesn't list the names of every person who has borrowed that book. It just tells you where a particular book is located. You can search for a book in several ways: by the author, by the book's title, or even by any unusual keywords that appear in the text of a book. The All-States Library Database was one such service.

Alison stared at the screen in front of her. She tabbed down to the SEARCH BY KEYWORD button. She typed:

ANTARCTICA.

The computer whirred for about ten seconds, and the results of the search came up on the screen:

1,856,157 ENTRIES FOUND. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE A LIST?

Great. One million, eight hundred and fifty thousand books contained the word Antarctica in some way or another. That was no help.

Alison thought for a second. She'd need a narrower key word, something a lot more specific. She got an idea. It was a long shot, perhaps a little too specific. But she thought it was worth a try anyway. She typed:

LATITUDE -66.5° LONGITUDE 115° 20' 12"

The computer whirred as it searched. This time the search didn't take long at all. The results came up on the screen:

6 ENTRIES FOUND. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE A LIST?

"You bet your ass I'd like to see a list," Alison said. She hit the "Y" key for "Yes" and a new screen appeared. On it was a list of book titles and their locations.

ALL-STATES LIBRARY DATABASE

SEARCH BY KEYWORD

SEARCH STRING USED:LATITUDE -66.5°

LONGITUDE 115° 20' 12"

NO. OF ENTRIES FOUND: 6

TITLE

AUTHOR

LOCATION

YEAR

DOCTORAL THESIS

LLEWELLYN, D. K.

STAMFORD, CT

1998

DOCTORAL THESIS

AUSTIN, B.K.

STAMFORD, CT

1997

POSTDOCTORAL THESIS

HENSLEIGH, S. T.

USC, CA

1997

FELLOWSHIP GRANT RESEARCH PAPER

HENSLEIGH, B. M.

HARVARD, MA

1996

THE ICE CRUSADE: REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR SPENT IN ANTARCTICA

HENSLEIGH, B. M.

HARVARD, MA

1995 AVAIL: AML

PRELIMINARY SURVEY

WAITZKIN, C. M.

LIBCONG

1978

Alison stared at the list.

Every one of these entries, in some way or another, mentioned latitude minus 66.5 degrees and longitude 115 degrees, 20 minutes, and 12 seconds.

They were mainly university papers. None of the names meant anything to Alison: Llewellyn, Austin, and the two Hensleighs, S and B.

It looked like the latter Hensleigh?B. M. Hensleigh?had written a book on Antarctica. Alison looked at its location reference. It had been printed at Harvard University, but it was available at AML?all major libraries. Unlike all of the other entries?a collection of single-issue privately published theses?this Hensleigh guy's book was videly available. Alison decided she'd check it out.

There was, however, one other entry that caught her attention.

The last one.

PRELIMINARY SURVEYWAITZKIN, C. M.LIBCONG1978

Alison frowned at the final entry. She checked a quick reference list that was affixed to the side of the computer monitor. It was a list of all of the abbreviations used in the database. Alison found "LibCong."

"Aha," she said aloud.

LibCong stood for the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress was situated across the road from the Capitol Building, not far from Alison's office.

Alison looked at the final entry again. She wondered what a preliminary survey was. She looked at the date of the entry.

1978.

Well, whatever it was, it was over twenty years old, so it was worth checking out.

Alison smiled as she hit the button marked: PRINT SCREEN.

"All right! Hoist her up!" Book called.

Rebound and Snake pulled on the stabilizing cables, and Wilkes Ice Station's battered radio antenna?a long black pole thirty feet high, with a-blinking green beacon light at its tip?rose slowly into the air. The intermittent flash-flash of the green beacon light illuminated all of their faces.

"How long do you think it will take?" Schofield asked Book, yelling above the wind.

"It won't take us long to hoist it up; that's the easy part," Book replied. "The hard part will be reconnecting all the radio wiring. We've got the power going again, but there's still another fifteen or so radio wires to solder back together."

"Ballpark?"

"Thirty minutes."

"Get to it."

Shane Schofield trudged back down the entrance ramp of the station and headed inside. He had come back inside to check on two things: Abby Sinclair and Mother.

Abby met him on the A-deck catwalk. While Schofield and the others had been outside, she had been in the radio room looking at weather maps on the computer, trying to find a break in the solar flare.

"Any luck?" Schofield asked.

"Depends on what you mean by luck," Abby said. "How soon did you want it?"

"Soon."

"Then I'm afraid it's not that good," she said. "By my calculations, a break in the solar flare will pass over this station in about sixty-five minutes."

"Sixty-five minutes," Schofield said. "How long will it last?"

Abby shrugged. 'Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Long enough to get a signal through."

Schofield bit his lip as he took all of this in. He had been hoping to get a window in the solar flare a lot sooner than that. He desperately needed to get in contact with McMurdo Station to tell them about the French warship that was sailing off the coast of Antarctica aiming a battery of missiles at Wilkes Ice Station.

He asked, "Will there be any more breaks coming over the station?"

Abby smiled. "I thought you'd ask that, so I checked it out. There will be two more breaks in the flare after the first one, but there's a long wait for them. OK. The time is now 2:46 p.m. so the first window period won't be until 3:51 P.M., sixty-five minutes from now. The other two will be a lot later, at approximately 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. tonight."

Schofield sighed. This wasn't good at all.

"Good work, Abby," he said. "Good work. Thank you. If you want something else to do, I was hoping you might like to man the radio room while my men fix your antenna outside. Just in case anything comes through."

Abby nodded. "I'd like that."

"Good," Schofield said. Abby wanted something to do, needed something to do. The events of the previous few hours had hit her hard, but once she had something to occupy her, she seemed to be OK.

Schofield smiled at her and headed for the rung-ladder.

Mother was sitting on the floor with her back up against the cold ice wall when Schofield entered the storeroom on E-deck. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be sleeping.

"Hey there," she said, without opening her eyes.

Schofield smiled as he came over and crouched beside her. "How you feeling?" he asked.

Mother still didn't open her eyes. "Methadone's good."

Schofield looked down at what was left of Mother's left leg. Book had bandaged up the jagged protrusion at her knee quite well. The bandages, however, were soaked through with blood.

"Guess I won't be playing football anymore," Mother said.

Schofield looked at her face, and he saw her open her eyes.

"That fucking fish took my leg," she said indignantly.

"I noticed. Could have been worse, though."

"Don't I know it," Mother snorted.

Schofield laughed.

Mother looked him over as he laughed. "Scarecrow. Have I ever told you that you are one damn fine-lookin' man?"

Schofield said, "I think that's the methadone talking."

"I know a good man when I see one," Mother said as she leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes slowly.

Schofield spoke softly. "I'm not certain of many things, Mother, but one thing I am certain of is that I am not much to look at."

Schofield began to think about the two scars that cut down across his eyes and how hideous they were. People instinctively winced when they saw them. When he was back home, he almost always wore sunglasses.

As he thought about his eyes, Schofield must have looked away from Mother for an instant, because when he looked back at her he found that she was staring at him. Her eyes were hard and sharp, not glazed or drugged out. They bored right through his reflective silver glasses.

"Any woman who won't have you 'cause of your eyes doesn't deserve you, Scarecrow."

Schofield said nothing. Mother let it go.

"All right, then," she said. "Now that we got all these pleasantries out of the way"?she raised her eyebrows suggestively?"what brings you down to my neck of these woods? I'm hoping it wasn't just to check up on my health."

"It wasn't."

"Well... ?"

"Samurai's dead."

"What?" Mother said seriously. "They told me he was stable."

"He was murdered."

"By the French?"

"No, later. Much later. The French were all dead when he was killed."

"It wasn't one of their scientists?"

"Accounted for."

Mother spoke evenly. "One of our scientists?"

"If it was, I can't figure out why," Schofield said.

There was a short silence.

Then Mother said, "What about the one that was shut up in his room when we got here? You know, what's-his-name. Renshaw."

Schofield's head snapped up.

He had completely forgotten about James Renshaw. Renshaw was the scientist Sarah Hensleigh had said had killed one of his fellow scientists only days before the Marines had arrived at Wilkes. He was the man the residents of Wilkes had locked inside his room on B-deck. After Samurai's death, Schoneld hadn't even checked to see if Renshaw was still in his room. If Renshaw had escaped, then maybe he had ...

"Shit, I forgot all about him," Schofield said. He quickly eyed his helmet mike. "Book, Rebound, Snake, you out there?"

"Copy, Scarecrow," Snake's voice replied.

"Snake, I need someone up there to go down to B-deck right away and make sure that that guy who was shut up in his room is still there, OK?"

"I'm on it," Snake said.

Schofield clicked off his intercom.

Mother smiled, spread her arms wide. "Honestly, where would you be without your Mother, Scarecrow?"

"Lost," Schofield said.

"Don't you know it," Mother said. "Don't you know it." She eyed Schofield carefully; he was staring at the floor. What's wrong?" she said softly.

Schofield kept his head down. He shook his head slowly.

"I should have known they were soldiers, Mother. I should have anticipated it."

"What are you talking about?"

"I should have locked them up as soon as I saw them?"

"You couldn't do that."

"We lost three men."

"Honey, we won."

"We got lucky," Schofield said seriously. "We got very, very lucky. They'd flushed four of my men out onto that catwalk and were about to slaughter them when they dropped into that pool. Christ, look at what happened down in the drilling room. They had a plan right up to the end. If Rebound hadn't caught wind of it beforehand, they would have got us, Mother, even at the very end. We were on the back foot the whole damn time. We didn't even have a plan at all."

"Scarecrow. Listen to me," Mother said firmly. "You wanna know something?"

"What?"

Mother said, "Did you know that about six months ago I was offered a place in an Atlantic Recon unit?"

Schofield looked up at that. No. He hadn't known.

"I still have the letter back home if you want to see it," Mother said. "It's signed by the Commandant himself. You know what I did after I got that letter, Scarecrow?"

"What?"

"I wrote back to the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps and said thank you very much, but I would like to stay with my current unit, under my commanding officer, Lieutenant First Class Shane M. Schofield, USMC. I said that I could find no better unit, under no better commander, than the one I was currently in."

Schofield was momentarily stunned. That Mother would do such a thing was quite incredible. To reject an offer to join an Atlantic Recon Unit was one thing, but to politely decline the personal invitation of the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps to join such a unit was something else.

Mother looked Schofield squarely in the eye. "You are a great officer, Scarecrow, a great officer. You are smart and you are brave and you are something that is very, very rare in this world: you are a good man.

"That's why I stayed with you. You've got a heart, Scarecrow. You care about your men. And I'll tell you right now, that puts you above every other commander I have ever known. I am prepared to risk my life at your judgment because I know that whatever the plan is, you're still worried about me.

"A lot of commanders, they're just looking for glory, looking for a promotion. They ain't gonna care if that dumb ol' bitch Mother gets herself killed. But you do care and I like that. Shit, look at you now. You're beating up on yourself because we almost got our asses capped. You are smart, Scarecrow, and you are good, and don't you ever doubt that. Ever. You just have to believe in yourself."

Schofield was taken aback by the force of Mother's words. He nodded. "I'll try."

"Good," Mother said, her tone now a little more upbeat. "Now. Was there anything else you wanted to hear from 'Dear Abby' while you were down here?"

Schofield snuffed a laugh. "No. That's it. I better get going, check on this Renshaw guy." He stood up and headed for the doorway. When he reached the doorway, however, he stopped suddenly and turned.

"Mother," he said, "do you know anything about men being planted in units?"

"What do you mean?"

Schofield hesitated. "When I found out Samurai had been murdered, I remembered something that happened a couple of years ago to a friend of mine. At the time, this friend had said something about people planting men inside his unit."

Mother looked hard at Schofield. She licked her lips, didn't speak for a very long time.

"It's not something I like to talk about," she said quietly. "But, yes, I have heard about it."

"What have you heard?" Schofield stepped back into the storeroom.

"Only rumors. Rumors that get bigger and bigger each time you hear 'em. As an officer, you probably don't hear this shit, but I'll tell you, if there's one thing about enlisted men, it's that they gossip like a bunch of old women."

"What do they say?"

"Enlisted grunts like to talk about infiltrators. It's their favorite myth. A campfire story designed by senior line animals to scare the booties off the junior troops and make them trust one another. You know, if we can't trust each other, who can we trust, or something like that.

"You hear all kinds of theories about where these infiltrators come from. Some folks reckon they're inserted by the CIA. Deep-cover agents enlist with the armed forces with the sole purpose of infiltrating elite units?so that they can keep tabs on us, make sure we're doin' what we're supposed to be doin.'

"Others say it's the Pentagon that does it. Others still say it's the CIA and the Pentagon. I heard one guy?a real fruit-loop named Hugo Boddington?say once that he'd heard that the National Reconnaissance Office and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a joint subcommittee that they called the Intelligence Convergence Group and that it was the office that was in charge of infiltrating American military units.

"Boddington said the ICG was some kind of ultrasecret committee charged with hoarding intelligence. Charged with ensuring that only the right people in the right places knew about certain stuff. That's why they have to infiltrate units like ours. If we're on a mission and we find something we're not supposed to?I don't know, like a crashed space shuttle or something?those ICG guys are there to wipe us out and make sure that we don't tell anybody about what we saw."

Schofield shook his head. It sounded like a ghost story. Double agents among the troops.

But in the back of his mind there was a single doubt. A doubt that took shape in the form of Andrew Trent's voice screaming over Schofield's helmet radio from inside that Incan temple in Peru: "They planted men in my unit!... They planted fucking men in my unit!" Andrew Trent was no ghost story.

"Thanks, Mother," Schofield said as he headed back for the door. "I better get going."

"Ah, yes," Mother said. "A unit to run. People to organize. Responsibility to take. I wouldn't be an officer for all the money in the world."

"I wish you'd told me that ten years ago."

"Ah, yes, but then tonight wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun. You take care, you hear me, Scarecrow. Oh, and hey," she said. "Nice glasses."

Schofield paused for a moment in the doorway. He realized that he was wearing Mother's antiflash glasses. He smiled. "Thanks, Mother."

"Hey, don't thank me," she said. "Hell, the Scarecrow without his silver glasses, it's like Zorro without his mask, Superman without his cape. It just ain't right"

"Call me if you need anything," Schofield said.

Mother gave him a wicked grin. "Oh, I know what I need, baby," she said.

Schofield shook his head. "You never quit, do you?"

Mother smiled. "You know what?" she said coyly. "I don't think you realize it when someone has their eye on you, honey."

Schofield raised an eyebrow. "Does someone have their eye on me?"

"Oh, yes, Scarecrow. Oh, yes."

Schofield shook his head, smiled. "Good-bye, Mother."

"Good-bye, Scarecrow."

Schofield left the storeroom and Mother sank back against the wall.

When Schofield was gone, she closed her eyes and said softly to herself, "Does someone have their eye on you? Oh, Scarecrow. Scarecrow. If only you could see the way she looks at you."

Schofield stepped out onto the pool deck.

The whole station was deserted. The cavernous shaft was silent. Schofield stared at the pool, at the stationary cable that stretched down into it.

"Scarecrow, this is Fox," Gant's voice said over his earpiece. "Are you still up there?"

"I'm still here; where are you?"

"Dive time is fifty-five minutes. We are proceeding up the ice tunnel."

"Any sign of trouble?"

"Nothing yet?whoa, wait a minute: who's this?"

"What is it, Fox?" Schofield said, alarmed.

"No. It's nothing," Gant's voice said. "It's all right. Scarecrow, if that little girl's up there with you, you might want to tell her that her friend is down here."

"What do you mean?"

"That fur seal, Wendy, She just joined us in the tunnel. Must have followed us down here."

Schofield pictured Gant and the others swimming up the underwater ice tunnel, covered in their mechanical breathing apparatus, while beside them Wendy swam happily, not needing any such equipment.

"How far have you got to go?" Schofield asked.

"Hard to say. We've been going extra slow, just to be careful. I'd say it'll be another five minutes or so."

"Keep me posted," Schofield said. "Oh, and, Fox. Use caution."

"You got it. Scarecrow. Fox, out."

The radio clicked off. Schofield stared at the water in the pool. It was still stained red. At the moment, it was calm, glassy. He took a step forward, toward it.

Something crunched beneath his feet.

He froze, looked down at his boots, bent down.

On the metal deck beneath his feet lay some broken shards of glass. White frosted glass.

Schofield frowned at the glass.

And then, with frightening suddenness, a voice cut across his helmet intercom: "Scarecrow, this is Snake. I'm on B-deck. I just checked Renshaw's room. There was no answer when I banged on his door, so I busted it open. Sir, there was no one in there. Renshaw is gone. I repeat, Renshaw is gone."

Schofield felt a chill run down his spine.

Renshaw wasn't in his room.

He was somewhere inside the station.

Schofield was about to move, about to go and find the others, when he heard a soft puncturelike sound, followed by a faint whistling through the air. There came a sudden thwacking noise, and Schofield immediately felt a stinging, burning sensation on the back of his neck and then, to his horror, he suddenly realized that the thwacking noise had been the sound of something impacting against his neck at extremely high speed.

Schofield's knees buckled. He suddenly felt very weak.

He immediately put his hand to his neck and then held it out in front of his face.

His hand was slicked with blood.

Blackness slowly overcame him and Schofield dropped to his knees. The world darkened around him, and as his cheek thudded down against the ice-cold steel of the deck Shane Schofield had a single terrifying thought.

He had just been shot in the throat.

And then suddenly the thought vanished and the world went completely and utterly black.

Shane Schofield's heart...

... had stopped.

FOURTH INCURSION

16 June 1510 hours

Libby Gant swam up the steep underwater ice tunnel.

It was quiet here, she thought, peaceful. The whole world was tinted pale blue.

As she swam, Gant could hear nothing but the soft, rhythmic hiss of her low-audibility breathing gear. There were no other sounds?no whistling noises, no whale song, no nothing.

Gant stared out through her full-face diving mask. In the glare of her halogen dive lantern the icy walls of the tunnel glowed a ghostly blue-on-white. The other divers?Montana, Santa Cruz, and the scientist woman, Sarah Hensleigh? swam alongside her in silence.

All of a sudden the ice tunnel began to widen dramatically and Gant saw several large round holes set into the walls on either side of her.

They were larger than she had expected them to be?easily ten feet in diameter. And they were round, perfectly round. Gant counted eight such holes and wondered what kind of animal could possibly have made them.

And then, abruptly, she forgot about the holes set into the ice walls. Something else had seized her attention.

The surface.

Gant keyed her intercom. "Scarecrow. This is Fox," she said. "Scarecrow. This is Fox. Scarecrow, are you out there?"

There was no reply.

"Scarecrow, I repeat, this is Fox. Come in."

Still no reply.

That was strange, Gant thought. Why would Scarecrow not answer her? She had spoken to him only a few minutes ago.

Suddenly a voice crackled over her earpiece.

It wasn't Schofield.

"Fox, this is Rebound!" He seemed to be shouting above some wind. He must have been outside the station. "I read you. What's up?"

"We're approaching the surface now," Gant said. "Where's Scarecrow?" she added a little too quickly.

"He's inside the station somewhere. Down with Mother, I think. Must have taken his helmet off or something."

Gant said, "Well, it might be a good idea to go find him and tell him what's going on down here. We're about to surface inside the cavern."

"Got it, Fox."

Gant clicked off her radio and resumed her swim upward.

The water's surface looked strange from below.

It was glassy. Still. It looked like a warped glass lens of some sort, completely distorting the image of whatever it was that lay beyond it.

Gant swam toward it. The others rose slowly in the water beside her.

They all broke the surface together.

In an instant, the world around Gant changed and she found herself treading water in the center of an enormous pool situated at one end of a massive underground cavern. She saw Montana and Santa Cruz hovering in the water beside her, with Sarah Hensleigh behind them.

The cavern was absolutely huge. Its ceiling was easily a hundred feet high, and its walls stretched so far into the distance that the farthest reaches of the cavern were cloaked in darkness, evading the fiarsh luminescent glare of the Marines' high-powered halogen lanterns.

And then Gant saw it.

"I'll be damned ...," she heard Santa Cruz say.

For a full minute, Gant could do nothing but stare. Slowly, she began to make her wav toward the edge of the pool. When she finally stepped up onto solid ground, she was totally entranced. She couldn't take her eyes off it.

It looked like nothing she had ever seen before. Like something out of a movie. The mere sight of it took her breath away.

It was a ship of some sort.

A black ship?completely black from nose to tail?about the same size as a fighter jet. Gant saw that its two enormous tail fins were embedded in the ice wall behind it. It looked as if they had been consumed by the ice as it had crept slowly forward through the ages.

The huge black spacecraft just stood there?in stark contrast to the cold white cavern around it?standing high on three powerful-looking hydraulic landing struts.

It looked fantastic, otherworldly.

And it looked mean.

Black and pointed, sleek and sharp, to Gant it looked like a huge praying mantis. Its two black wings swooped down on either side of its fuselage so that it looked like a bird in flight with its wings at the lowest extremity.

The most striking feature of all, however, was the nose.

The ship had a hooked nose, a nose that pointed sharply downward, like the nose on the Concorde. The cockpit?a rectangular reinforced tinted-glass canopy?was situated right above the hooked nose.

A huge praying mantis, Gant thought. The sleekest, fastest?biggest?praying mantis that anyone has ever seen.

Gant realized that the others were also out of the water now, standing beside her on the frost-covered floor of the cavem, also staring up at the magnificent spacecraft.

Gant looked at her companions' faces.

Santa Cruz's mouth hung open.

Montana's eyes were wide.

Sarah Hensleigh's reaction, however, struck Gant as strange. Hensleigh's eyes had narrowed and she stared at the spacecraft in an unusual way. Despite herself, Gant felt a sudden chill. Sarah Hensleigh's eyes glowed with what looked dangerously like ambition.

Gant shook the thought off. and with the initial spell of the spacecraft broken, her eyes began to take in the rest of the gigantic cavern.

It took all of ten seconds for her to see them.

She froze instantly.

"Oh, God ...," she said, her voice low. "Oh, God...."

There were nine of them.

Bodies.

Human bodies, although at first it was hard to tell.

They were laid out on the floor on the far side of the pool?some lay flat on their backs; others lay draped over large rocks by the edge of the pool. Blood was everywhere. Puddled on the floor, splashed against the walls, lathered all over the bodies themselves.

It was carnage.

Limbs had been torn from their sockets. Heads had been wrenched from shoulders. Circular chunks of flesh had been ripped from the chests of some of the bodies. Exposed bones lay all over the floor, some of them splintered, others with ragged pieces of flesh still clinging to them.

Gant swallowed hard, tried desperately to keep herself from throwing up.

The divers from the station, she thought.

Santa Cruz stepped up alongside her and stared at the mutilated bodies on the far side of the pool.

"What the hell happened down here?" he said.

Schofield dreamed.

At first there was nothing. Nothing but black. It was like floating in outer space.

And then all of a sudden?whack?a glaring white light shattered Schofield's very existence, jarred him like an electric shock, and he felt searing pain like he had never felt before.

And then, just as suddenly as it had come, the shock vanished and Schofield found himself lying on a floor somewhere?cold and alone, asleep but awake.

It was dark. There were no walls.

He felt a wetness against his cheek.

It was a dog. A large dog. Schofield couldn't tell what type. He could only tell that it was big. Very, very big.

The dog nuzzled against his cheek, sniffed inquisitively. Its cold wet nose brushed against the side of his face. Its whiskers tickled his nose.

It seemed curious, not at all threatening?

And then suddenly the dog barked. Loud as hell.

Schofield jumped. The dog was barking madly now at some unseen foe. It seemed impossibly angry?frenzied, furious?baring its teeth at this new enemy.

Schofield continued to lie on the cold floor of the wall-less room unable?or just unwilling?to move. And then, gradually, the walls around him began to take shape, and soon Schofield realized that he was lying on the metal decking of E-deck.

The big dog was still standing over him, barking ferociously, snarling. The dog, it seemed, was defending him.

But from what? What could it see that he could not?

And then suddenly the dog turned and ran away and Schofield lay alone on the cold steel deck.

Asleep but awake, unable to move, Schofield suddenly felt vulnerable. Exposed.

Something was approaching him.

It came from the direction of his feet. He couldn't see it, but he could hear its footsteps as they clanged?slowly, one after the other?on the cold steel deck.

And then suddenly it was over him and Schofield saw an evil smiling face appear above his head.

It was Jacques Latissier.

His face was covered in blood, contorted in an obscene sneer. Ragged pieces of flesh hung loosely from an open wound in his forehead. His eyes were alive, burning with hate. The French commando raised his glistening knife so that it was right in front of Schofield's eyes.

And then he brought the knife down in a violent slashing?

"Hey," someone said gently.

Schofield's eyes darted open and he awoke from his dream.

He was lying on his back. In a bed of some sort. In a room with dazzling white fluorescent lights. The walls were white, too, made of ice.

A man stood over him.

He was a small man, about five-foot-three. Schofield had never seen him before.

The man was short and wiry, and he had two enormous blue eyes that seemed way too big for his small head. Large black bags hung beneath both of his eyes. He had messy brown hair that looked like it hadn't been brushed in months and two huge front teeth that were horribly askew. He wore a Kmart wash-and-wear shirt and a pair of blue polyester trousers; in fact, he looked decidedly underdressed for the near-freezing conditions inside Wilkes Ice Station.

And he was holding something.

A long-bladed scalpel.

Schofield stared at it.

The scalpel had blood on it.

The man spoke in a flat nasal voice. "Hey. You're awake."

Schofield squinted in the light, tried to lift himself up off the bed. He couldn't do it. Something stopped him. He saw what it was.

Two leather straps bound his arms to the sides of the bed. Two more straps bound his legs. When he tried to raise his head to further examine his situation, he found that he couldn't even do that. It, too, was strapped tightly down against the bed.

Schofield's blood went instantly cold.

He was completely tied down.

"Just hold on a minute," the short man said in his irritating nasal voice. "This will only take one ... more ... second."

He raised his bloody scalpel and ducked out of Schofield's field of vision.

"Wait!" Schofield said quickly.

The short man returned instantly to Schofield's view. He raised his eyebrows questioningly. "Yes?"

"Where ... where am I?" Schofield said. It hurt to speak. His throat was parched, dry.

The man smiled, revealing his crooked front teeth. "It's OK, Lieutenant," he said. "You're still at Wilkes Ice Station."

Schofield swallowed. "Who are you?"

"Why, Lieutenant Schofield," the man said, "I'm James Renshaw."

"Welcome back from the grave, Lieutenant," Renshaw said as he unbound the leather strap around Schofield's head. He had just finished removing the last three bullet fragments from Schofield's neck with his scalpel.

Renshaw said, "You know, you were very lucky you were wearing this Kevlar plate inside your collar. It didn't stop the bullet entirely, but it took most of the speed off it."

Renshaw held up the circular Kevlar insert that had previously been fitted inside Schofield's gray turtleneck collar. Schofield had forgotten all about his neck protector. To him, it was just another part of his uniform. Kevlar neck protectors were issued exclusively to Marine officers, as an extra defense against snipers. Enlisted men received no such protection, since enemy snipers rarely cared for corporals and sergeants.

With the leather strap around his forehead now removed, Schofield raised his head and looked at the Kevlar insert that Renshaw held in his hand.

It looked like a priest's white collar?curved and flat, designed to encircle its wearer's neck while remaining hidden inside his turtleneck collar. On one side of the circular Kevlar insert, Schofield could see a jagged, gaping hole.

The bullet hole.

"That bullet would have killed you for sure if it weren't for your insert," Renshaw said. "Would've cut right through your carotid. After that there would have been nothing anyone could have done for you. As it happened, the bullet shattered as it passed through your Kevlar insert, so only a few small fragments of it lodged in your neck. Still, that would have been enough to kill you, and as a matter of fact, I actually think it did, at least for a short time."

Schofield had stopped listening. He was taking in the room around him. It looked like someone's living quarters. He saw a bed, a desk, a computer, and, strangely, a pair of black-and-white TV monitors mounted on top of two video recorders.

He turned to face Renshaw. "Huh?"

"Several fragments of the bullet lodged in your neck, Lieutenant. I'm pretty sure?in fact, I'm absolutely certain?that for at least thirty seconds, you lost your pulse. You were clinically dead."

"What do you mean?" Schofield said. He instinctively tried to raise his hand to feel his neck. But he couldn't move his arm. His arms and legs were still firmly tied down to the bed.